Preamble

The House met at a Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

AUSTRALIA (BRITISH MIGRANTS).

Mr. McGOVERN: I rise to ask your permission, Mr. Speaker, and the permission of the House, to present a Petition from the British Migrants in Australia.
To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The humble petition of the undersigned members of the British Migrants' Association of Australia showeth:

(1) That we are British-born subjects and natives of the United Kingdom.
(2) That we were induced to leave our homes in the United Kingdom and migrate to Australia by the statements and propaganda of the Australian Governments and their authorised agents, offering us the prospect in Australia of better conditions and opportunities for ourselves and our families.
(3) Such statements and propaganda were, as we have found to our sorrow and dismay, extravagant, misleading, and in many cases indubitably false. Our members have been, in consequence, reduced to misery, semi-starvation and despair. Suicides are frequent. Some have lost their reason. Young women have sold their virtue, and many of our young men are herded together in camps of unemployed on conditions hardly better than the conditions of convicts in British prisons.
(4) The Migration Agreement has been dishonoured in practice; whilst in theory it is pleaded as an excuse for the indifference and failure of the Australian Government. We have appealed in vain to the Honourable His Majesty's Prime Minister of Australia, and to His Majesty's Acting High Commissioner in Australia.
Your petitioners therefore humbly Pray that your Honourable House will institute an immediate inquiry into the matters alleged in this, our petition, and that your Honourable House will relieve our present needs and cause us to be compensated for the loss caused to us by the statements and propaganda referred to in paragraph (2) hereof, and to be repatriated without delay.
And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.
Signed by the appropriate petitioners.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.

Chester Corporation Bill,

Read the Third time, and passed.

Ministry of Health Provisional Order (Northampton) Bill,

Read the Third time, and passed.

Edinburgh Corporation Order Confirmation Bill [Lords],

Read the Third time, and passed, without Amendment.

NEW WRIT.

For Borough of St. Marylebone, in the room of the right hon. Sir James Rennell 13 odd, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O. (Manor of Northstead).—[Captain Margesson.]

Oral Answers to Questions — UNEMPLOYMENT.

WORK SCHEMES (WEST RIDING, YORKSHIRE).

Mr. PRICE: 1.
asked the Minister of Labour the number of persons now employed by the West Riding County Council on schemes of work for which Government grants have been made; and the number of persons employed on such work at the end of August, 1930 and 1931?

The MINISTER of LABOUR (Sir Henry Betterton): At 18th March, 1932, 928 men were employed under the West Riding County Council on schemes of work approved for Government Grant. The corresponding numbers at 29th August, 1930, and 28th August, 1931, were 874 and 2,099 respectively.

TRANSITIONAL PAYMENTS.

Mr. EDWARD WILLIAMS: 2.
asked the Minister of Labour what representations were made by his Department to the Glamorgan Public Assistance Committee with regard to the administration of the means test for transitional payment; and what reply has been received?

Sir H. BETTERTON: The attention of the Glamorgan County Council was drawn to serious infraction of the provisions of Article 1 (4) of the Order in
Council in rules drawn up for the guidance of their guardians committees and in determinations given within their area. I am happy to say the council have informed me in reply that they have withdrawn the illegal rules and that all cases will in future be dealt with on their merits. I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my appreciation of the manner in which my representations have been met.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: 8.
asked the Minister of Labour whether he will appoint a committee to inquire into the working of the means test with a view to its abolition?

Sir H. BETTERTON: No, Sir.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Does not the Minister see that it is time that he gave, some consideration to the demonstration's which are going on throughout the length and breadth of the country at the present time as a result of the harsh treatment which is being meted out to tens of thousands of workmen under the means test?

Mr. SPEAKER: This is not the time to debate the question.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: I hope that the question which I am putting now is in order in relation to the original question. I received a definite answer and that was "no," and my supplementary question, following upon that, asks whether the conditions in the country to-day do not demand that the Minister should do something.

HON. MEMBERS: Order!

Mr. SPEAKER: The Minister gave a very definite answer to the question upon the Paper, and I said that this is not the time to debate the question.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: With all due respect to you, Sir, it is not an attempt to debate the question, but it is a very serious matter affecting tens of thousands of people, and the Minister ought to give a reply to the question.

Mr. HOLFORD KNIGHT: Has the attention of my right hon. Friend been called to the numerous demonstrations which are taking place up and down the country by men out of work and subject to the means test, and what action are the Government going to take?

Mr. SPEAKER: Mr. Kirkwood.

Mr. KNIGHT: On a point of Order. Can I not have an answer?

Mr. SPEAKER: It is not a time for debate, and I am not going to allow it.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Surely that is evidence that something is wrong.

Mr. BRIANT: 9.
asked the Minister of Labour if he will furnish a statement showing the total number of persons who were refused transitional payment, or who were granted it at less than the maximum rate, during the months of January and February and were subsequently, during the following four weeks, granted relief by public assistance committees, or a similar statement for typical public assistance areas?

Sir H. BETTERTON: As my hon. Friend knows, the amount of transitional payments is assessed by the public assistance authority. If an applicant who is otherwise qualified for such payments has been assessed at less than the full rate, I find it difficult to conceive any circumstances in which the same authority would give what would be in effect a contradictory decision by granting relief. I know that statements to the contrary were made in last Monday's Debate, but think this must have been due to some misunderstanding, and if any hon. Member knows of such a case, T should be glad to have particulars.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Has the hon. Gentleman yet thought fit to issue instructions to public assistance committees to standardise public assistance in the same way as unemployment insurance benefit, and to give as much as the recipients would get if they were drawing unemployment insurance benefit?

Sir H. BETTERTON: As the hon. Gentleman knows, I have no power to issue instructions. If I understood the hon. Gentleman's question correctly, however, I rather gather that it ought to be put down to the Ministry of Health.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: When we put a question to the Minister of Health he says that it ought to be put to the Minister of Labour, and each Minister pushes it off from one to the other. The Minister of Health is shaking his head, but that has been our experience.

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member might put it down to both Ministers.

STATISTICS.

Mr. E. WILLIAMS: 3.
asked the Minister of Labour if he will furnish figures showing the estimated number of unemployed men and women on 31st March, 1932, or the nearest convenient date, in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, United States of America, and Argentina; and state whether any of these countries have reduced the hours of labour with the object of increasing the number of persons employed?

Sir H. BETTERTON: As the reply is somewhat long, I will, if I may, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following is the reply;

A summary of such statistics as are officially published with regard to employment and unemployment in the principal overseas countries is regularly published in the Ministry of Labour Gazette under the heading "Employment Overseas," and the latest information received will be given in the April issue, which will be published on Monday next. I would also refer the hon. Member to my reply of 7th April to the hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. R. Davies) of which I am sending him a copy. As regards the second part of the question, the only case of which I am aware is the German Emergency Order of 5th June, 1931, which gave the Federal Government power to reduce the normal statutory working week to 40 hours or more, and I understand that action under this Order is suspended for the time being.

Mr. PARKINSON: 6.
asked the Minister of Labour the number of men and the number of women that have been unemployed for more than six months; and whether he can give the number who are aged between 60 and 65?

Sir H. BETTERTON: At 21st March, 1932, there were on the registers of Employment Exchanges in Great Britain 646,420 men and 67,979 women applying for insurance benefit or transitional payments whose period of registered unemployment had then lasted for six months or more. I am unable to say how many of these were aged 60 to 65.

Lieut.-Colonel Sir FREDERICK HALL: Considering that there are nearly 70,000 women unemployed and the great difficulty that there is in obtaining domestic servants, cannot some steps be taken to endeavour to utilise the services of these women for the purpose of domestic service?

Sir H. BETTERTON: As my hon. and gallant Friend knows, we are always examining this matter, and our policy has not differed in this respect from that of the last two Governments.

Mr. PARKINSON: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether it will be possible to give the number of persons who are aged between 60 and 65?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I do not think that we can do so. I do not think that we have any record that would enable us to give the information which the hon. Member desires because we have not the statistics. But I will look into the matter again, and, if I can give any figure, either actual or approximate, I will certainly do so, but I do not think that we have the statistics.

BUILDING TRADES.

Mr. McGOVERN: 4.
asked the Minister of Labour the number of building trade workers who were unemployed on 1st April, 1932, and the number on 1st April, 1930 and 1931; and the present weekly cost of unemployment benefit?

Sir H. BETTERTON: The number of insured workpeople in the building industry classification recorded as unemployed in Great Britain was 241,706 at 21st March, 1932; 181,931 at 23rd March, 1931; and 128,248 at 24th March, 1930. Accounts are not kept of benefit or transitional payments paid in separate trades, but assuming that the average rates for men and boys apply to this trade, the approximate cost in March, 1932, would be £190,000 a week.

BENEFIT.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: 10.
asked the Minister of Labour whether, in view of the improved state of the national finances, he will take steps to restore the cuts in unemployment benefit?

Sir H. BETTERTON: No, Sir. The position would not justify such a proposal.

Mr. MAXTON: May I ask if the answer that the right hon. Gentleman has given is not in anticipation of the Budget statement?

Sir H. BETTERTON: That is a matter on which the hon. Member must draw his own conclusions.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: I put this question to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and he turned it over to the Minister of Labour. I know perfectly well that the Minister of Labour has not the power—

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member must not debate the matter.

Mr. DEVLIN: Were not definite promises given that as soon as the finances of the country were satisfactorily adjusted this question would be considered by His Majesty's Government?

Sir H. BETTERTON: Yes, Sir, and when the finances of the country permit it, the matter will be answered, but I would point out that the fund is already paying out something like £200,000 per week more than the income, and, further, there is an overdraft, a deficit on borrowing, amounting to something like £115,000,000.

Mr. MAXTON: Are we to understand that, in spite of the very drastic step taken by the National Government, the country's finances are not yet on a sound footing?

Sir H. BETTERTON: The hon. Member must draw his own conclusions, but I would point out as I pointed out the other day, that the need for the most drastic economy is still imperative.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: We have to take it that all the activities of the Government have utterly failed to foot the bill.

FOREIGN SHIPS FOR DEMOLITION (IMPORT DUTY).

Mr. LOUIS SMITH: 41.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is aware that the liability to general ad valorem duty of ships imported for demolition in this country is productive of increased unemployment, since such ships are now being sent for breaking-up purposes to foreign countries; and whether he will take this fact into consideration in the Finance Bill?

The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Chamberlain): I am not aware that any increase in unemployment which is attributable to the cause suggested has occurred since the imposition of the general ad valorem duty.

Mr. SMITH: Is it possible for Customs officers to treat a ship coming into this country as one large piece of scrap, to be broken up into smaller pieces? It could then come in under the words of the Act.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I am afraid that I cannot answer that question without notice.

BOOT FACTORY, WELLINGBOROUGH (DISPUTE).

Mr. PARKINSON: 5.
asked the Minister of Labour whether his attention has been drawn to the dispute at the Wellingborough boot factory of Messrs. Yorke; and whether his Department are making any efforts to effect a settlement?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I am aware of this dispute. The chief conciliation officer for the area has been in touch with both parties and has informed them that the services of the Department are available in any way that may lead to a settlement.

CONSISTORY COURTS (PRESS REPORTS).

Mr. KIRKWOOD: 13.
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will consider extending the legislation which forbids the publication of details of divorce cases to include all future cases in which the evidence is of an indecent character?

The SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Sir Herbert Samuel): If the hon. Member has in mind the evidence given before the Consistory Court, I would refer him to the reply given yesterday by the Solicitor-General to a question by the hon. Member for Bolton.

FACTORY INSPECTION (REPORT).

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: 14.
asked the Home Secretary when the Factory Inspectors' Report for the year 1931 is likely to be issued?

Sir H. SAMUEL: I understand that this report is practically complete, but the printing and correction of proofs will take some time and I am afraid the report is not likely to be issued till about the middle of June.

BOY SCOUTS (PATROL DUTY).

Mr. HOWARD: 16.
asked the Home Secretary whether he will consider the possibility of giving increased security to banks and post offices by utilising the services of the Boy Scout organisation for patrol duties as was done successfully during the War?

Sir H. SAMUEL: The suggestion is not favoured by the Boy Scouts Association arid does not appear to be practicable.

Mr. HOWARD: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that there are over 5,000 Rovers in London between the ages of 17 and 25 who could form a very valuable reserve to the existing forces of law and order, and would it not be a practical demonstration of the carrying into effect of the ideals of personal service so eloquently appealed for by the Prince of Wales?

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Is that not a speech?

Sir H. SAMUEL: There may be something in the arguments of the hon. Member, but it is not considered that this is the right way in which to give increased security to banks and post offices.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRANSPORT.

MOTORING OFFENCES (POLICE WARNING).

Captain HAROLD BALFOUR: 17.
asked the Home Secretary whether motorists receiving a warning from a police officer at the time of the alleged offence will continue under this revised procedure to have the option of refusing the warning and asking for a police prosecution?

Sir H. SAMUEL: A verbal warning is given by a police officer only in trivial cases which would not ordinarily be regarded as calling for report with a view to possible prosecution. The circumstances would, however, be specially reported if the person concerned took exception to the warning.

Mr. GODFREY NICHOLSON: Is it not a fact that having been warned by a police officer, as I have been, the next time that I am in trouble with the police this warning will be held against me? Am I not to have a chance of appeal against the warning?

Sir H. SAMUEL: Yes. If the hon. Member thought it advisable to take exception to the warning he would have it recorded, and then a prosecution could take place if the circumstances required.

HACKNEY CARRIAGES (POLICE INSPECTORS).

Mr. GROVES: 21.
asked the Home Secretary what experience in craftsmanship, either in woodwork or engineering, is possessed by the section of the Metropolitan Police responsible for issuing licences to stage coaches, omnibuses, tramcars and taximeter cabs?

Sir H. SAMUEL: About 80 per cent. of the police officers engaged in inspecting the vehicles referred to were, before they joined the police service, craftsmen with practical experience, either of mechanical and automobile engineering or of bodybuilding and woodwork generally. The remainder have shown a special aptitude for the work since they joined. Police officers are not promoted to the rank of inspector in this section unless they have successfully passed a course of two years' study at a school of engineering.

REMAND PRISONERS (TOBACCO).

Captain BALFOUR: 18.
asked the Home Secretary if he can now make any statement as to the results of the experiment of allowing remand prisoners at Brixton the use of tobacco and as to the possible extension of the privilege to other prisons?

Sir H. SAMUEL: The results of this experiment thus far are satisfactory, but sufficient experience has not yet been gained to justify its extension to other prisons.

Captain BALFOUR: Can the right hon. Gentleman say how long will be needed for the results before be can make some further announcement?

Sir H. SAMUEL: I think this matter should be left to the discretion of the Prison Commissioners, and I have no doubt that they will take further action as soon as they think it desirable.

POLICE STATION, SUNBURY-ON- THAMES.

Sir REGINALD BLAKER: 19.
asked the Home Secretary what is the estimated nett annual saving to be effected by the closing of the police station at Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex; and what is the annual amount raised by the Sunbury-on-Thames urban district council for police purposes?

Sir H. SAMUEL: The closing of this station will save about £2,500 a year. This saving does not arise out of any reduction in the police protection afforded to the district, but is solely in respect of the station staff which is no longer required. With the police rate at its present level, the Sunbury urban district will contribute about £6,600 this year to the Metropolitan police fund.

Sir R. BLAKER: Does the right hon. Gentleman intend to persist in this decision, in face of the earnest representations made by the inhabitants to the local authority?

Sir H. SAMUEL: I think those representations must have been made under a misapprehension. This will have no effect upon the police protection of the district. The inhabitants of Sunbury-on-Thames are interested, like other taxpayers, in saving £2,500 a year.

Sir R. BLAKER: Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that this particular neighbourhood has been subject in recent months to a very large increase in crimes of violence and murder.

Sir H. SAMUEL: This will not affect that point.

Mr. HUTCHISON: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that many of the outer districts of London are growing at a very rapid rate and that in many cases the police are not adequate for these new districts.

Sir H. SAMUEL: That is why the Commissioner of Police is making all practicable economies without interfering with efficiency, in order that the expenditure on the force may be used to the best advantage.

MAIDSTONE GAOL

Mr. BOSSOM: 20.
asked the Home Secretary if a portion of the present site of Maidstone gaol will be available for the extension of the county offices; and will compensation be allowed to the Kent County Council who have incurred expenses on the understanding that they would shortly have possession of the site?

Sir H. SAMUEL: The Prison Commissioners are in correspondence with the Kent County Council in regard to this matter, and I regret that I cannot at present make any statement on the subject.

SWEEPSTAKES, LOTTERIES AND BETTING (ROYAL COMMISSION).

Mr. HUTCHISON: 22.
asked the Home Secretary whether there will be any alteration in the administration of the law affecting sweepstakes by his Department during the period in which this question is being examined by the proposed commission?

Sir H. SAMUEL: I do not contemplate any alteration.

Mr. HUTCHISON: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that many magistrates have different notions as to the penalties that should be imposed, and therefore would it not be of great value if there were some official statement as to what action should be taken in these cases?

Sir H. SAMUEL: That is precisely one of the matters under consideration by the Royal Commission, and I must await their recommendation.

POOR LAW RELIEF.

Mr. PRICE: 23.
asked the Minister of Health if he can state the number of able-bodied unemployed persons in receipt of public assistance in Leeds, Sheffield, Rotherham, Wakefield, and Barnsley on the 31st March, 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932?

The MINISTER of HEALTH (Sir Hilton Young): I will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT a statement giving such information as is available.

Following is the statement:


Average number of unemployed persons and their dependants
(distinguishing the latter where possible) in receipt of out-relief during the undermentioned
months.








March, 1932.


County Borough.
April, 1930 (including dependants).
March, 1931 (including dependants).
Including dependants.
Excluding dependants.


Leeds
…
…
…
2,159
2,898
4,407
1,462


Sheffield
…
…
…
7,751
13,754
34,701
10,639


Botherham
…
…
…
122
201
394
161


Wakefield
…
…
…
96
125
137
47


Barnsley
…
…
…
155
157
325
120


The unions which, before the operation of the Local Government Act, 1929, included the county boroughs mentioned were not co-extensive with those boroughs and the desired information cannot therefore be furnished for the months of March, 1929 and 1930.


The figures for Sheffield, Wakefield and Barnsley relate to February, 1932, and not to March, 1932.

Mr. GORDON MACDONALD: 36.
asked the Minister of Health the number of persons in receipt of relief from the public assistance committee in Wigan; the amount paid for the week ended 31st July, 1931, and for the latest week for which such information is available; and if he will give the same information for the county area contiguous to Wigan?

Sir H. YOUNG: The total number of persons (men, women and children) in receipt of poor relief, excluding casual and, domiciliary medical relief, in the county borough of Wigan on the 2nd April, 1932, was 3,249. The average weekly amount of out-relief paid during July, 1931, was £597 and during March, 1932, was £724. The returns as to poor relief made to my Department relate to counties and county boroughs as a whole, and corresponding information as to the contiguous part of the administrative county is not available.

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: Has the attention of the right hon. Gentleman been called to the fact that there is a great disparity between the treatment given within the towns of Wigan and Oldham and the treatment meted out to the same type of persons in the area of the county of Lancashire outside those boroughs?

Sir H. YOUNG: I should like to have notice of that question; it does not arise out of the original question. I do not know of these particular cases, but where any such disparities exist they are made the subject of immediate inquiry.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSING.

NON-PARLOUR HOUSES.

Mr. LIDDALL: 25.
asked the Minister of Health the number of local authorities which have adopted the suggestion contained in Circular 1,238, issued by the Ministry of Health, 12 January, 1932, of the three-bedroomed non-parlour house of about 760 square feet; and if the same amount of subsidy is granted as for the house of 950 square feet?

Mr. LOGAN: 30.
asked the Minister of Health what authorities in England and Wales have taken action in accord with Circular 1,238, issued by the Ministry on 12th January, 1932; and what is the number of houses proposed, or in course of construction, of the three-bedroom non-parlour type of about 760 square feet, to be let at 10s. a week or less, inclusive of rates?

Sir H. YOUNG: I regret that precise figures are not available. Since the issue of the Circular the erection by 150 local authorities in England and Wales of 11,670 houses, few of which materially exceed the size named, has been approved. The amount of the Exchequer subsidy does not vary according to the size of the house.

SLUM CLEARANCIE.

Mr. GROVES: 27.
asked the Minister of Health how many slum-clearance schemes are at present, being carried out in England and Wales; the total number of houses to be demolished; and the total number of houses to be constructed?

Sir H. YOUNG: I have received resolutions declaring 417 areas in England and Wales, the clearance of which involves the demolition of approximately 14,000 houses, to be clearance areas under the Housing Act, 1930. It is anticipated that houses sufficient for the accommodation of 68,000 persons will be provided.

Mr. GROVES: Can the right hon. Gentleman say what period these figures cover?

Sir H. YOUNG: I will ascertain and let the hon. Member know.

Mr. PARKINSON: 38.
asked the Minister of Health the number of clearance orders submitted to him by local authorities under Section 2 of the Housing Act, 1930; the number which he has approved; the number of houses affected thereby; the number of areas declared by local authorities to be improvement areas under Section 7 of the Housing Act, 1930, and the number of houses comprised within such areas; and the total amount of the annual contributions made by the Ministry under Section 26 of the Housing Act, 1930, with respect to the re-housing of persons displaced as the result of action by local authorities, distinguishing between persons displaced as an outcome of clearance areas, improvement areas, the demolition of insanitary houses, and the closing of parts of buildings?

Sir H. YOUNG: I will send a statement to the hon. Member giving the information for which he asks.

RENT RESTRICTIONS ACTS.

Mr. PRICE: 34.
asked the Minister of Heath what boroughs, other than Kingston-upon-Hull and Newcastle-on-Tyne, have formed rent committees to deal with contraventions of the Rent Restrictions Acts; and whether reports from these committees are being received in the Ministry and being considered in connection with the proposed legislation on rent restriction?

Sir H. YOUNG: Local authorities do not necessarily inform me when they set up committees to deal with Rent Act questions, so that I cannot give the hon. Member the information desired, though I am aware of the constitution of such a committee in Sunderland. In some cases copies of reports made to their local authorities by the committees, or of
resolutions based thereon, have been sent to my Department and will be considered in connection with any amending legislation.

Mr. MAXTON: Can the right hon. Gentleman let us know when we are going to have the amending legislation?

Sir H. YOUNG: There is a specific question on that point.

Mr. JAMES DUNCAN (for Major Sir HERBERT CAYZER): 26.
asked the Minister of Health when the legislation to enforce the general recommendations of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Rent Restrictions Acts will be introduced?

Sir H. YOUNG: I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the reply given on the 6th April to the hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Parkinson).

LOCAL AUTHORITIES (CONTRACTS).

Mr. GROVES: 28.
asked the Minister of Health whether his Department will take steps to ensure that all contracts for supplies to local authorities are made as the result of open tender; and whether his Department ensures that no proprietary article is prescribed?

Sir H. YOUNG: It is the practice, in cases where my sanction is required to a loan, to require open tenders and, where the matter comes before me, to object so far as practicable to the specification of proprietary articles unless there are special reasons to the contrary. Contracts for ordinary supplies which are paid for out of revenue are not subject to my approval.

Lieut.-Commander AGNEW: May I ask whether it is a result of instructions issued by the right hon. Gentleman's Department, that firms in which individual members of a local authority are interested are debarred from submitting tenders?

Sir H. YOUNG: As regards the interests of individual members of local authorities in possible contracts, that is a matter for the general law, and, if anything is done outside the general law perhaps the hon. Member will call my attention to it.

Oral Answers to Questions — PUBLIC HEALTH.

RUSSIAN BUTTER.

Mr. LAMBERT: 31.
asked the Minister of Health whether he is satisfied that butter imported from Soviet Russia is of the standard of purity required by the home product?

Sir H. YOUNG: Numerous samples of butter imported from Soviet Russia have been examined during recent months. The results of these examinations have shown that this butter conforms to the standard of purity required in this country.

Mr. LAMBERT: Why are regulations required for the home producer and not for the foreign importer?

Sir H. YOUNG: It is an entirely different thing; the administration is different. Home production and foreign production must be dealt with in different ways, but the provisions relating to imports are adequate to secure proper standards.

INCURABLE DISEASES.

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: 33.
asked the Minister of Health if he has any information as to the number of persons suffering from incurable disease in this country and the number for whom accommodation is provided by voluntary organisations; and whether there are any public institutions for incurables who are unable to look after themselves, apart from mental institutions?

Sir H. YOUNG: I regret that I am not in possession of any statistics on the points raised in the question. I do not know of any institutions that exactly answer the description in the last part of the question.

MILK (SPECIAL DESIGNATIONS) ORDER. 1923.

Mr. GLOSSOP: 35.
asked the Minister of Health whether he is satisfied with the way in which licensing authorities under the Milk (Special Designations) Order, 1923, are performing their duties; and whether he exercises any supervision over these authorities to see that they are performing their duties under the Order?

Sir H. YOUNG: Yes, Sir. According to the information in my possession the licensing authorities generally are per-
forming their duties satisfactorily. If, however, my hon. Friend has any particular case in mind, I shall be glad to make inquiry into it.

Oral Answers to Questions — GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS.

MINISTRY OF HEALTH.

Mr. LAMBERT: 32.
asked the Minister of Health the total numbers engaged at the Ministry on housing and town planning at the latest available date in 1932?

Sir H. YOUNG: The number so engaged at the present datet is 91.

MINISTRIES.

Mr. VYVYAN ADAMS: 46.
asked the Prime Minister, if, with a view to economy, he will consider a reduction in the number of Ministries?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: In view of the heavy work devolving upon Ministers, it would not be in the public interest to adopt my hon. Friend's suggestion.

Mr. ADAMS: In view of the Prime Minister's expressed desire for more Ministers without portfolio, will the Government consider the possibility of co-ordinating the Navy, Army and Air Forces into one Ministry of Defence in the interests of economy and efficiency?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: That question has often been considered in the past.

Mr. COCKS: Is it really necessary to retain Ministers who are merely skeletons at a protectionist feast?

TAX OFFICE (DEPARTMENTAL CLAIMS BRANCH).

Brigadier-General NATION: 51.
asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury what are the official hours of work in the office of the Chief Inspector of Taxes, Departmental Claims Branch, Cornwall House, Stamford Street, S.E.1?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Major Elliot): The normal hours of work at the present time are from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. except on Saturdays when they are from 9 a.m. to noon.

Brigadier-General NATION: In view of the short hours worked in this Department, and the amount of Income Tax deducted from Members of Parliament, is it not possible to reduce the staff?

Oral Answers to Questions — TRADE AND COMMERCE.

IMPORT DUTIES.

Captain ERSKINE-BOLST: 42.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, in view of the importance to the trades affected of a revision of duties imposed on goods whose nature was not originally understood when the Import Duties Act was passed, he will make a statement at the earliest possible date?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: If my hon. and gallant Friend will let me know the particular point which he has in mind, I shall be happy to have it looked into. I may remind him that under the Import Duties Act the Advisory Committee will have power to recommend the revision of duties imposed tinder that Act.

Mr. CHRISTIE: 44.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer the amount collected by way of duty on the sugar content of the sweetened condensed milk imported into this country during the last financial year?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The approximate amount was £613,000.

Captain ERSKINE-BOLST: 47.
asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury whether any decision has yet been reached with regard to the assessment of Customs duties on imported undeveloped films; and what is the nature of such decision?

Major ELLIOT: If my hon. and gallant Friend will furnish me with particulars as to the precise point on which he is expecting a decision, I will be glad to make inquiries.

CORPORATION DUTY.

Mr. PEAT: 43.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he is aware that the Inland Revenue are endeavouring to collect Corporation Duty levied under the Inland Revenue Act of 1885 from a number of associations formed solely for purposes of trade, whereas the Act in question does not apply to associations carrying on trade or business; and will he take immediate steps to stop the action complained of, which is adding a burden on industry and imposing disproportionate expense of collection on the Inland Revenue?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: If my hon. Friend will furnish me with particulars of any case he has in mind I will have inquiry made.

BRITISH IMPORTS, TUNIS (SURTAX).

Mr. MABANE: 63.
asked the President of the Board of Trade if he will inquire why the 15 per cent. surtax is being charged on British goods entering Tunis, in view of the fact that Tunis is a French protectorate and not a French colony?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Hare-Belisha): The fact that Tunis is a protectorate does not appear to affect the issue as the surtax was imposed in Tunis by a Tunisian decree of 30th November last.

IRISH FREE STATE.

Mr. SMEDLEY CROOKE: 64.
asked the President of the Board of Trade the value of exports and imports as between this country and the Irish Free State for the years 1929, 1930, and 1931?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: My hon. Friend will find the particulars he desires on pages 123, 126 and 130 of the issue of the "Accounts relating to Trade and Navigation of the United Kingdom" for January last.

Mr. HERBERT WILLIAMS: Has any estimate been formed of the proportion of trade which is from Great Britain and the proportion from. Northern Ireland?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: Yes, Sir.

Mr. MAXTON: Has the hon. Gentleman ever looked at the Trade and Navigation Returns; and does he realise how impossible it is for a busy Member of this House to do the investigation necessary to find out a few figures?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: It is equally an imposition upon Ministers and their staffs, against whose increase the hon. Member from time to time protests.

Mr. MAXTON: Not at all. I am most anxious that every Minister should have a staff capable of doing the work, and I ask the hon. Gentleman if he could not see his way, when asked a specific question like this, to get the appropriate official to dig out the actual answer wanted, instead of giving a reply like that which he has just given?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: That would duplicate the work. These accounts are published and are easily understandable by all persons of normal intelligence.

Mr. MAXTON: If I may be allowed to press the hon. Gentleman on this point, may I ask him, does he think that the answer to the question asked by the hon. Member for Deritend (Mr. Crooke) is of interest only to that hon. Member; and does he expect that 615 of us are to go digging into the Trade and Navigation Returns for an answer which might be got by one junior clerk?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: I Am very sorry that the hon. Member feels like that about the matter, but I went to the trouble of giving the exact pages upon which these figures can be found.

Sir PERCY HARRIS: Would it not be just as easy to give the exact figures themselves?

Mr. H. WILLIAMS: Is it not the case that questions are frequently refused at the Table on the ground that the information has already been published?

Mr. MAXTON: No.

ABNORMAL IMPORTATIONS ACT.

Mr. DIXEY: 65.
asked the President of the Board of Trade the intention of the Government with regard to the extension of the Abnormal Importations (Customs Duties) Act?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: The position of the duties imposed under this Act has not been overlooked and a statement will be made in due course.

Mr. DIXEY: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that a large number of people in the country are awaiting such an announcement, which is of importance with regard to their trade; and, in view of that fact, will he say when the Government will make a statement?

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: It was because I was aware of that fact that I gave the answer which I have just given to the hon. Member's question.

IMPERIAL ECONOMIC CONFERENCE.

Mr. LAMBERT: 45.
asked the Prime Minister whether, as agricultural products
from the Dominions come in competition with British-grown agricultural products in the British market, he will state what representation British agriculture is to have at the coming Ottawa Conference?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: It has always been the Government's intention that British agricultural interests should be represented at Ottawa. The actual representation has not yet been determined.

Mr. LAMBERT: Do the Government recognise the principle that the home producer should have the first preference in the home market?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The right hon. Gentleman may be assured that the home agricultural interests will be given consideration at Ottawa.

Mr. SALT: 72.
asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs if, in view of the important part merchants must take in the expansion of trade which is to be expected to follow the Ottawa Conference, he will appoint representatives to attend so that their experience may be utilised?

The SECRETARY of STATE for DOMINION AFFAIRS (Mr. J. H. Thomas): I am not at present in a position to add anything to the last part of the answer which I gave on this subject to the hon. and gallant Member for the Isle of Wight (Captain P. Macdonald) on 13th April.

HORSE RACING (KING'S PLATES).

Mr. MABANE: 50.
asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury whether the races for the King's Plates in Ireland were run in 1931 in the Irish Free State or in Northern Ireland?

Major ELLIOT: All the races were run as usual, seven in the Free State and one in Northern Ireland.

Mr. MABANE: Can the Financial Secretary say what he expects to be the result of these races in the current year, and whether the result has justified the imposition on the taxpayer of this country of a sum of £1,563 for prizes for these races run in the Irish Free State?

Major ELLIOT: It would be impossible, as in the case of the Budget, to anticipate the result of these races.

Oral Answers to Questions — AGRICULTURE.

PIG INDUSTRY.

Colonel BALDWIN-WEBB: 54.
asked the Minister of Agriculture if the Government will publish at an early date the last report of the Pig Industry Council in connection with the reorganisation of the industry?

The MINISTER of AGRICULTURE (Sir John Gilmour): Reports of the Pig Industry Council are addressed to me and the question of publication is within my discretion. I regard their recent report as in the nature of a confidential document, and I do not propose in this case to arrange for publication.

Colonel BALDWIN-WEBB: 55.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether, in view of the acceptance by the pig industry of his conditions, he will announce at an early date the appointment of the Reorganisation Commission; and whether he will announce the personnel of that Commission?

Sir J. GILMOUR: As I have already stated in replies to previous questions I hope shortly to be able to make an announcement on the subject.

Mr. LAMBERT: Can the right hon. Gentleman say when he hopes to make the announcement, which is rather eagerly awaited?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I hope next week.

Colonel BALDWIN-WEBB: 56.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether, in view of the period likely to elapse before the Pig Industry Reorganisation Commission is able to report and steps to control imports can be taken, and in view of the decline in the numbers of brood sows now being caused by the present depressed price for pig meat, the Government will consider taking immediate measures to limit the present flow of imports?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I have carefully considered my hon. and gallant Friend's suggestion, but regret that I do not see my way to adopt the course indicated. I feel sure, however, that the Reorganisation Commission which is about to be appointed will address itself to its task without avoidable delay.

BEEF (MARKING AND GRADING).

Mr. BURNETT: 57.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether and, if so, when it is proposed to publish the evidence taken by the Second Inter-Departmental Committee on the marking and grading of beef?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I am afraid I am not in a position to publish the evidence referred to. Much of it relates to the experience of private traders, and some of it was given under a promise of confidence, and for this reason the Committee, as started in paragraph 2 of their report (Cmd. 4047), felt they were unable to disclose it.

Mr. BURNETT: Does my right hon. Friend think it fair to the other parties that private traders should he able to give their evidence under the promise that it will be treated as confidential?

CROSSENS DRAINAGE AREA.

Mr. ROSBOTHAM: 60.
asked the Minister of Agriculture if he is aware that farmers and market gardeners in the Crossens drainage area have suffered losses through the flooding of the land in their occupation; and if he can state the reason for delay, after public inquiry, in giving sanction to the scheme prepared by the Crossens Drainage Board, so that the drainage of the land for the purpose of growing vegetables can be proceeded with and so find employment for a number of persons and thus increase our home-grown food supply?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Since the public inquiry to which my hon. Friend refers took place, my Department have been in close consultation, both with the catchment board and with the objectors to the scheme submitted by them, with a. view to a compromise which will obviate further objection, and I am now informing the catchment board of the form in which I am prepared to confirm their scheme. I am aware that drainage is urgently required in the Crossens catchment area, but there is nothing to prevent the catchment board arid the existing internal drainage board from carrying out, at the present time, such remedial works as may be necessary for dealing with the more important of the watercourses in the area.

SMALL HOLDINGS, LANCASHIRE.

Mr. G. MACDONALD: 61.
asked the Minister of Agriculture the number of applications for small holdings made to the Lancashire County Council and the number granted for each of the three years ended 31st December, 1931, and also during 1932?

Sir J. GILMOUR: As the answer contains a table of figures I will, with the hon. Member's permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following is the answer:


Year.
Number of Applications for Smallholdings and Cottage Holdings.
Number of Applicants settled.


1929
83
62


1930
78
14


1931
128
25


1932 (to 13th April).
23
25

SUGAR INDUSTRY.

Captain CROOKSHANK: 59.
asked the Minister of Agriculture how much sugar not exceeding 90 degrees polarisation, commonly called raw sugar, has been produced and sent to British refineries by the beet-sugar factories since the passage of the Finance Act, 1928; and what has been the total cost to the Exchequer whether in extra subsidy paid, or in excise duty not received, since that date?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Since the passage of the Finance Act, 1928, approximately 460,000 tons of raw sugar (not exceeding 99 degrees polarisation) has been produced and sent to refineries by British sugar-beet factories. It is estimated that, compared with the subsidy and excise duty payments appropriate to an equivalent quantity of fully refined beet-sugar, the production of this raw sugar has involved increases in subsidy payments and decreases in revenue receipts representing in all a total approaching £500,000.

Captain CROOKSHANK: Is my right bon. Friend aware that this very high cost is due to the fact that the ratio is wrong as between raw and white sugar?

Colonel Sir JAMES REYNOLDS (for Mr. PURBRICK): 53.
asked the Minister of Agriculture in what countries the production of sugar either from beet or cane is neither subsidised nor protected; and what proportion of the world sugar is produced from such areas?

Sir J. GILMOUR: I regret that I am unable to supply this information.

KENYA (DEFENCE FORCE ORDINANCE).

Mr. MANDER: 67.
asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies Why it has been decided to apply the compulsion and penalty clauses of the defence force ordinance in Kenya, as from 1st May; and how many conscript soldiers are likely to be obtained in each year as a, result?

The SECRETARY of STATE for the COLONIES (Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister): The Defence Force Ordinance of 1927 provides that members of the force in Class I shall undergo an annual period of training not exceeding 100 hours. The Governor has made a Regulation under this ordinance prescribing the period of training as 60 hours for recruits and 37 hours for others. Failure to comply with this regulation renders a member of the force liable to prosecution under the Defence Force Ordinance. I am advised that, if the efficiency of the force is to be maintained, it is necessary that the penalty clauses should be preserved and if necessary be enforced. No change has been made in the number or classes of persons liable to service under the Ordinance of 1927 except that certain exemptions have been made.

Mr. MANDER: Is this the only part of the British Empire where conscription exists?

Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I think that is so. I think there are several Colonies where there is power in the Governor, in case of emergency, to create and call out a defence force, but the Defence Force Ordinance in Kenya, which was passed in 1927 and has been maintained by successive Governors since, is, I believe, in a class by itself.

PALESTINE.

Mr. DAVID ADAMS: 68.
asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies if he
is now in a position to state when the committee of inquiry into labour legislation in Palestine is likely to submit its report?

Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I am unable to furnish any definite information, but I understand that there is some prospect of this committee being in a position to present an interim report towards the end of May.

Mr. ADAMS: 69.
asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he is able to state the number of Arab labourers in Palestine who are members of trade unions?

Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: The only Arab trade unions in Palestine in respect of which figures are available are the Christian (Orthodox) Labour Union and the Arab Carpenters' Union. The first has a membership of about 300 and the second one of 150. No figures are available with regard to the membership of various other Arab trade unions or of the number of Arabs who may belong to trade unions not organised on a racial or religious basis.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Is it not the case that Arabs and Jews and people of other nationalities are organised in the trade unions, irrespective of nationality, in Palestine just as elsewhere?

Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I think I should like notice of that question.

Mr. ADAMS: 70.
asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies what additional numbers of Jews have been employed on public works in Palestine in fulfilment of the promise made by the Prime Minister to Dr. Weizmann, in his letter of the lath February, 1931, that Jews would be employed according to the proportion of taxes paid by them?

Sir P. CUNLIFFE-LISTER: I would remind the hon. Member that the actual wording of the Prime Minister's undertaking to Dr. Weizmann was as follows:
With regard to public and municipal works falling to be financed out of public funds, the claim of Jewish labour to a due share of the employment available, taking into account Jewish contributions to public revenue, shall be taken into consideration.
The Government of Palestine is endeavouring, in consultation with the Executive of the Jewish Agency, to devise
a suitable formula for the determination of the Jewish share of employment on public works, and in the meantime steps have been taken to increase the number of Jews employed on public works. Except, however, in the case of Haifa Harbour works, where 340 Jews were employed at the 31st December, 1931, as compared with 183 at the 31st December, 1930, no figures are available.

BRITISH ARMY (STRENGTH).

Brigadier-General NATION: 73.
asked the Financial Secretary to the War Office what steps are being taken or are contemplated to remedy the fact that the strength of the Regular Army is 30,500 and the Territorial Army 40,000 below that authorised in the Army Estimates for the current year?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the WAR OFFICE (Mr. Duff Cooper): My hon. and gallant Friend appears to have compared the strength of the Regular Army at home with the establishment both at home and abroad (exclusive of India). The actual deficit on the 1st March was about 8,000 as anticipated in the Secretary of State's memorandum on Estimates and it is expected that this deficit will be reduced during the present year. As regards the Territorial Army, I would refer him to page 61 of the Estimates. On 1st March, the deficit in the strength for which money has been provided amounted to about 4,000.

DISARMAMENT CONFERENCE.

Mr. MANDER: 74.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs what delegates are representing this country on the various committees and sub-committees of the Disarmament Conference at Geneva?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Mr. Eden): The United Kingdom Delegation to the Disarmament Conference is represented in the various committees and sub-committees as follows:

General Committee: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
Political Committee: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
995
Military Committee: Secretary of State for War.
Naval Committee: First Lord of the Admiralty.
Air Committee: Secretary of State for Air.
Budgetary Committee: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
As, however, all these delegates are not present at Geneva at the moment, the representation on the Military, Naval and Budgetary Committees has been entrusted to officers representing them.

Mr. MANDER: Has not the hon. Gentleman left out several of the delegates? Are they not represented on some of the sub-committees—Mrs. Corbett Ashby, for instance?

Mr. EDEN: I have given a list of delegates at present on these committees. The delegates may change from time to time.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS (REPORTS).

Mr. MANDER: 75.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether it is intended to publish reports of the proceedings of the meetings of the Council of the League of Nations as a White Paper in accordance with the practice under the previous Government?

Mr. EDEN: The sixty-sixth meeting of the Council which, as my hon. Friend will remember, started towards the end of January, is still technically in session, and it is therefore not possible at present to publish a White Paper describing its proceedings. Owing to the very extended nature of the session, and the complication of the questions which have been discussed, it will be a matter of considerable difficulty and expense to produce a White Paper giving within a reasonable compass an adequate picture of the proceedings, but His Majesty's Government will certainly consider whether it is possible to publish some account of the session, and it is not their intention to depart from the normal practice in this matter.

CHINA AND JAPAN.

Mr. NEIL MACLEAN: 76.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
whether, in view of the statement made in the twelfth report of the Shanghai Consular Committee that on 21st March there still were, approximately, 37,000 Japanese troops in the Shanghai area, he can state if there has yet been any diminution in their number and what is the usual number of Japanese troops in this area?

Mr. EDEN: In reply to the first part of the question, I would refer the hon. Member to the reply returned yesterday to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Wycombe (Sir A. Knox). As regards the second part, I understand that prior to the recent incidents there was a Japanese naval landing party of about 650 men stationed in Shanghai.

Mr. MACLEAN: Will the hon. Gentleman answer the last part of my question as to the diminution in the number of Japanese troops?

Mr. EDEN: If the hon. Member will refer to my answer yesterday, he will see that, as far as we know, the number is still approximately 37,009.

Mr. MACLEAN: Is any action being taken by our representative in Shanghai, or the Committee of Inquiry, to have the number reduced?

Mr. EDEN: The question of the Japanese troops at Shanghai is one of the questions which is now before the conference in which our representative has taken so active and untiring a part.

Mr. COCKS: Has not that conference broken down?

Mr. EDEN: No, Sir.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR CONFERENCE.

Mr. BRIANT: 7.
asked the Minister of Labour the names of the delegates and technical advisers to the International Labour Organisation Conference?

Sir H. BETTERTON: I will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT the information desired.

Mr. MANDER: Does the hon. Gentleman hope to go himself?

Sir H. BETTERTON: Yes, Sir.

Following is the information:

The following are the delegates from this country and their advisers at the International Labour Conference, of April, 1932:

Government Delegates:

Mr. F. W. Leggett (Principal Assistant Secretary, Ministry of Labour) and Sir Walter S. Kinnear, K.B.E. (Controller of Insurance, Ministry of Health). Sir Malcolm Delevingne, K.C.B., K.C.V.O. (Permanent Deputy Under-Secretary of State, Home Office),

will also act as Government Delegate for certain matters.

Advisers to Government Delegates:

Mr. E. G. Beare, C.B.E., Sir Gerald Bellhouse, C.B.E., Mr. G. S. Washington Epps, C.B., C.B.E., Mr. J. McK. Hendrie, Miss Hilda Martindale, O.B.E., Mr. E. H. Richards, Mr. R. C. G. Somervell, Mr. H. L. Tubbs, Mr. W. H. Lowe Watson, D.S.O., D.C.M., Mr. William Williams, O.B.E.

Employers' Delegate:

Mr. J. B. Forbes Watson, Director of the National Confederation of Employers' Organisations, Member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Office.

Advisers to Employers' Delegate:

Mr. H. E. Allen, Brigadier-General A. C. Bayley, D.S.O., Mr. S. W. Burleigh, Mr. E. W. Davies, Mr. C. M. J. Jones, Mr. Herbert Kay, Mr. H. S. Kirkcaldy, Mr. Cuthbert Laws.

Workpeople's Delegate:

Mr. Arthur Hayday, J.P., Vice-President of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, Vice-President of the Trades Union Congress General Council.

Advisers to Workpeople's Delegate:

Mr. Ernest Bevin, Mr. H. H. Elvin, Mr. A. A. H. Findlay, Mr. Charles Jarman, Mr. James Rowan, Mr. Herbert Smith, J.P., Mr. William Thorne, C.B.E., M.P., Miss Julia Varley.

LAW OFFICERS (SALARIES AND FEES).

Mr. MAXTON (for Mr. McGOVERN): 40.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer the amount of legal fees
and salary paid to the Attorney-General and the Lord Advocate during the period of office of the late Labour Government, 1929 to 1931?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The salaries and fees of the Attorney-General and the Lord Advocate in the period from the 10th June, 1929, to the 23rd August, 1931, are as follow:


—
Salary.
Fees.
Total.



£
£
£


Attorney-General
15,431
29,127
44,558


Lord Advocate
10,912
—
10,912


The Lord Advocate's salary covers the whole of the official business undertaken by him.

Mr. MAXTON: Has there been any reduction of these rates since the National Government came into office?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: A considerable reduction.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: What, then, must have been the salaries they were drawing before there was a reduction? Why should the Lord Advocate over and above his Parliamentary salary draw £10,000 a year? It is a shame!

Mr. MAXTON: May we take it that with the reduction since the National Government came in they are still drawing substantial emoluments?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The word "substantial," perhaps, is a matter of opinion.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.

Mr. LANSBURY: May I ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer the business for next week?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Monday: Supply, Committee, 6th Allotted Day, Board of Education Vote.
Tuesday: The Chancellor of the Exchequer will open his Budget.
Wednesday and Thursday: General discussion of the Budget Resolutions.
Friday: Supply, Committee, 5th Allotted Day (second part), Colonial Office Vote.
On any day, should time permit, other Orders will be taken.

NEW MEMBER SWORN.

Sir William Ray, knight, for the Borough of Richmond.

BILLS PRESENTED.

EPSOM COLLEGE BILL,

"to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners and of the Board of Education for the application or management of the charity or foundation called Epsom College, at Epsom, in the county of Surrey," presented by Dr. Burgin; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 58.]

GOLDSMITHS CONSOLIDATED CHARITIES BILL,

"to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of the charities called the Goldsmiths Consolidated Charities," presented by Dr. Burgin; to be read a second time upon Wednesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 59.]

FORD STREET CHARITY BILL,

"to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of the charity known as the Ford Street Charity, in the ancient parish of Tavistock, in the county of Devon," presented by Dr. Burgin; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 60.]

MAIDSTONE BREAD CHARITIES BILL,

"to confirm a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the application or management of the charities collectively known as the Bread Charities, in the ancient parish of Maidstone, in the county of Kent," presented by Dr. Burgin; to be read a Second time upon Wednesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 61.]

MESSAGE FROM THE LORDS.

That they have agreed to,—

Transitional Payments Prolongation (Unemployed Persons) Bill, without Amendment.

SELECTION (STANDING COMMITTEES).

STANDING COMMITTEE C.

Mr. William Nicholson reported from the Committee of Selection; That they
had discharged the following Member from Standing Committee C (added in respect of the Juries (Exemption of Firemen) Bill): Mr. Godfrey Locker-Lampson; and had appointed in substitution: Mr. Lennox-Boyd.

Mr. William Nicholson further reported from the Committee; That they had discharged the following Member from Standing Committee C (added in respect of the Rights of Way Bill): Mr. Hurd; and had appointed in substitution: Mr. Nunn.

Reports to lie upon the Table.

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY.

[4TH ALLOTTED DAY.]

Considered in Committee.

[Sir DENNIS HERBERT in the Chair.]

CIVIL ESTIMATES, 1932.

CLASS VI.

BOARD OF TRADE.

Motion made, and Question proposed,
That a sum, not exceeding £84,690, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1938, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Office of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade, and Subordinate Departments, including certain Services arising out of the War."—[NOTE.—£95,000 has been voted on account.]

The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Runciman): I hope the Committee will not expect me to give a digest of the Trade and Navigation Returns in making this opening statement. We are able now, some time after the beginning of the crisis from which we are slowly emerging, to take a survey of the industries which have been affected by national and international movements, and to form some view as to the success or failure of the policy which has been applied to them. I need hardly remind the Committee that we are the most highly industrialised country in Europe, that our commercial activities extend far outside this Continent and are still the greatest in the world, and that in transport we take the lead in quality as well as in volume. It is because of our world-wide interests that whatever happens in any part of the world is bound to have an effect, direct certainly, and it may be indirect, upon our great industries, our commercial relations and our shipping. The trade of Europe is much the most important to which we devote ourselves. One-third of our foreign trade was until recently European trade, but with, as one of our publicists said recently, a Europe which is half angry and half afraid, there has been a very great shrinkage in European traffic.
We should have suffered very much more had it not been for the action taken by the Government since last autumn. Our action has not been, as it has turned out, too hasty. We took practical steps in November and December last not a moment too soon, and we are able now to look upon the effect of the policy with some satisfaction. We have cut off the imports of a large quantity of goods with which we could most easily afford to dispense. We have cut down the luxuries imported into this country to a very much lower figure. Non-essentials which we have had to buy have been so diminished that our purchasing capacity has been quite sufficient for the purpose. The Abnormal Importations Orders of last winter appear to have kept down the imports into this country by at least £8,000,000 directly and some £18,000,000 or £17,000,000 directly and indirectly. That has been all to the good, and has enabled us, while reserving our purchasing power abroad for more pressing needs, to give to our industries at home such an impetus as they have not received at any time since 1921.
It is true that the number of industries thus affected is comparatively small, but no one moving about the industrial districts of England will have failed to observe that in the West. Biding of Yorkshire, for instance, there is greater activity than they have known for years past. Not only have most of the mills ceased to work short time, but many of them are working overtime. There appears to be every sign of a revival in some branches, though not in all, of the cotton trade. The manufacture of electrical machinery proceeds apace, and we have retained our foreign as well as our home customers.
If we were to take the measure of the activities of British trade from exports alone it would be found that we have suffered less in the world shrinkage of trade than has any other country. It may not give us much satisfaction to know that the decrease in the first quarter of this year below the first quarter of last year is about £11,000,000, but we get some satisfaction out of a comparison with the shrinkage in the trade of the United States, in the figures published by the German Government, and those which have recently been issued by the French and
the Netherlands Governments. Whereas our diminution has been 11 per cent. in January to March, and taking December to February has been 14 per cent., if we take the latter period and deal purely in dollars, the United States shrinkage has amounted to no less than 35 per cent., the German figures show a fall of 21 per cent., the French a fall of 33 per cent., and the Netherlands of more than 34 per cent. That shows that on the whole we have been holding our own, and rather more than holding our own, in comparison with our competitors.
It is only about eight months since a French author of great ability, and in command of a very pungent English style, wrote a series of articles in the "Times" in which he declared that we had lost a great deal of our national quality, that initiative had passed away from this country, and that we were demoralising our people by paying not only those who were in poverty, but those who were not in poverty, doles of which they were not in full need. He accused us of fostering the weak and the idle, and declared that we were incapable of any national or individual sacrifice; indeed, that we were showing every sign of national decadence. I wish Mr. Siegfried would come to England now and spend some time in Lancashire and Yorkshire and the industrial districts of London; and I would not like him to omit the area of the City of London. Then he would find, first of all, that our industries have adapted themselves to the needs of our time, that our workpeople have shown a tranquility and determination unrivalled in the world, and that in the General Election they made it perfectly clear that they were not going to allow nearer and narrower material interests to interfere with the national well-being. We may be accused of having slid off the Gold Standard, and by that means sacrificed the leadership of the financial world, but it is true, as Lord Revelstoke said yesterday, "While we have given up the leadership, nobody else has been able to take it." I commend to those Members of the House who have correspondence with France the advantages to be gained to our country if the true facts are made known. The advantages to our country were not as published in the "Times" last summer, but as we gather them from the official returns of to-day.
May I make some reference to the best Measure of all of our industrial activity? The publication of unemployment returns does not do the business well, because the number on the unemployed register is made up of men subject to various qualifications and limitations and the figures of last year are not exactly comparable with the figures of this year. The Ministry of Labour have taken some trouble to find out exactly how many individuals may be regarded as actually in employment. Whereas there was a very heavy diminution in the number of those who were in employment at the end of March, 1931, compared with the end of September, 1930—well over 250,000—there was an increase of very nearly 250,000 at the end of March, 1932, compared with the end of September; 1931. Indeed, the change is so remarkable that compared with what would have happened if the decline had continued, we have improved our position by no less than 486,000. I think that shows that the volume of our trade has been well maintained.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: Does that mean that there is that number more people employed in industry this year than there was at this time last year?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: That is exactly what it does mean, and I put it down very largely to the Government policy. While every other country in the world shows a heavy decrease we alone are able to show an increase in the number of persons employed, and I am sure that my hon. Friend is anxious that that should be so, because what he is concerned about is the number of people employed. The policy of the Government has always been directed to that end, and as far as we have been able to ascertain that movement has not yet exhausted itself.

Mr. KIRKWOOD: What about the Cunarder?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I would like to draw attention to the new industries which have come to this country. Nothing is more, remarkable than the way in which during the last few months and up to this very day applications for industrial sites in this country have been pouring in from abroad from enterprising firms anxious to start operations here, and of course, if they do that, they will employ
British labour. Let me give some instances. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there have been over 390 applications from foreign manufacturers at one time or another during the past few months, contemplating the establishment of factories in this country. No less than 70 British manufacturing concerns in this country are arranging to set up new undertakings with the assistance of foreign experts. These new concerns are very often under the direction of foreign experts, but it should not be imagined that this is detrimental to British interests. But for refugees who found their way into this country from France there would be very little textile industry in this country. It was a refugee at Kidderminster who laid the foundation of the carpet industry, and so we can run through the list of great industries which have been built up in that way. A larger number of people are taking an interest in the direction and organising of factories in this country, and we see some of our great industries growing, and this is bound to increase the employment of our people.
I have here a number of applications which have been made, and let us see what has actually been done. Production has actually been started in 43 of those factories within the last month, partly in factories which have been adapted and partly in factories hastily erected. Those factories have been built here by men of various nationalities, German, American, Belgian, and Swiss. They include businesses like knitwear, ribbons, furnishing fabrics, and other textiles, clothing, the metal trade, electric radio apparatus, leather goods, toilet products, paper, and a number of other articles. As one looks down the list, it will be found that every one of the articles now being manufactured in those factories is covered by the importation orders of last winter, and they have been followed up by a wide range of duties, and I think we can safely predict for those duties exactly the same result.

Mr. MAXTON: They are not new industries.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: A very large number of them are articles which have never been produced here before. What I mean by new articles is that they are new to
this country, and, if that be so, they must be employing more British men and women. That is all to the good, and the hon. Member ought not to express scepticism for that result, but thanks. Most of these new operations are in the area around London. Some people are doing their best to attract these new activities to areas where the older industries are languishing. The manufacturers of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands and the North East coast have done their best to make it clear to those who want to establish factories in this country that the old districts have a great advantage over the new ones, and they regard it as an advantage to encourage them to the old districts. There are districts where the industries are languishing, and some in which the old industries have died out entirely.

Mr. EDWARD WILLIAMS: Why cannot British capital be employed for this purpose?

An HON. MEMBER: Because you have spent it all.

4.0 p.m.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: This is not so much a question of British capital as of inventive skill. As to prices, they have no chance of permanent existence unless their prices are attractive to their customers. May I say that in dealing with these new enterprises I do not shut my mind to the advantages which come to the old industries from this new development. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of our British industries is that we have so often led the way in the use of new machinery in the past, and then allowed the lead to be, taken from us. I came across an instance last week in connection with what are called fully-fashioned hosiery machines, which were invented in this country by an English engineer, but have not been used here to any great extent although they have been used in Germany and other countries. The number that has been used in this country is so small that the capital involved in it is comparatively negligible. Now the tendency has been to use more of these machines, and a number of second-hand machines have been bought and brought over here. If there had been anything like the enterprise and inventive skill used in the production and regular use of these machines as there
was in their initial invention, they would never been the standard stock machines of Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Mr. CHARLES BROWN: If the right hon. Gentleman is referring to fine gauge hosiery machinery now being imported into this country, may I say that the same sort of machines can be made by Messrs. Cotton of Loughborough and by Messrs. Blackburn of Nottingham, quite equal in quality to anything that can be obtained.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I have no doubt that they can make them, but they have not been used as they should be. But now that fully-fashioned hosiery is a much more attractive article than ordinary hosiery, which owes its shape to being stretched out on a board when damp, instead of being woven to fit the limb. My hon. Friend, no doubt, would like to take part in this Debate on hosiery machinery. What I am saying is to show that we have very often ourselves to blame for not using the inventions of our own country and for allowing them to he adopted and used abroad. Now, under the impulse of new and internal enterprise, we are finding many more of these machines coming into use, but they cost about £2,000 apiece, and that involves a factory in a very large capital expenditure if it should proceed with their installation on anything like a commercial scale. These are not the only instances that can be given of inventions made in this country being neglected by those who might be thought most ready to use them.
No doubt hon. Members opposite will say that if these factories had been under State control, organised by State capital and run by those especially employed by the State for the purpose, there would have been none of this neglect of enterprise in the past. I do not know on what they would base that hope, but, speaking from my experience of State activity, I have never known any State Department ever dare, exercise the ordinary qualities of enterprise and adventure. On the contrary, the habit of all employés of the State is to play for safety. The only way to embark on new development is to show a spirit of adventure and take risks, which, naturally employés of the State are reluctant to take. They do not like to adventure with other people's money.
They are very careful about that, and, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition regards this with great hilarity, I would like him to mention a single case in which industry, as apart from service, has been a success under State control.

Sir STAFFORD CRIPPS: Will the right hon. Gentleman allow me to mention one during the War? Sulphuric acid was produced at a cheaper price and more efficiently by State factories than anywhere else.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: If we are going to conduct our industry in peace time on the conditions of war, I am afraid we shall make a great many mistakes, and one of the great mistakes would have been to have left sulphuric acid in the hands of the State. In these days of fierce competition, I venture to say the State would not have been able to hold its own. If the hon. and learned Member opposite is going to take illustrations from the War, he will be able to make a very long list, but not a list of industries which are able to live in a competitive world where they have no tied-house business such as a Government concern is, and where they would find it almost impossible to embark on new methods. The hon. and learned Gentleman spoke of the manufacture of sulphuric acid. There was no new departure in the manufacture of sulphuric acid at that time.

Sir S. CRIPPS: If the right hon. Gentleman will excuse my saying so, two perfectly modern plants which had no like in this country were put up by the State for the manufacture of sulphuric acid, and they resulted in a production cheaper than any pre-war price, although the War price was paid for the raw material.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The hon. and learned Gentleman knows perfectly well that during the War a man had to be a congenital idiot if he could avoid making a profit.

Sir S. CRIPPS: The right hon. Gentleman is, or was, associated with an industry which knew a great deal more about profit-making during the War than the sulphuric acid industry. I did not mention profits; I said they were able to produce at a cost which was much cheaper.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I leave the Committee to judge as to whether private enterprise in time of peace can be conducted on a War-time basis. I say that neither he nor his right hon. Friend has mentioned a single instance of an industry in time of peace—

Mr. LANSBURY: The right hon. Gentleman assumes something which was not in my mind. I was smiling at him because he was proving the failure of certain private capitalists to utilise a certain machine in a proper manner, and I said to myself, "Well, we really could not do worse!"

Mr. RUNCIMAN: If all that my right hon. Friend has to say for himself is that he could not do worse, I make him a present of the deduction. May I say, for my own part, that I do not much mind whether an industry is conducted by the individual or by the State, providing it can be run on a profitable basis and is capable of employing British people. I do not see why we should be doctrinnaire on that subject any more than on any other. One thing is essential—that we should not squander our resources. Unless we leave our resources in the hands of those who are able to employ them with efficiency and by economic methods, and to those who are able to embark on new enterprise, prepared to adventure their own money, or what is entrusted to them, we are bound to live in a country with stagnant industry. I believe far more in the beneficial effects of sound inventions than I do in legislation dealing with industry. The only example we have at the present time of State action as regards industry outside this country, is that it is restricting international trade at a rate far in excess of anything in our own experience. The extension of prohibition and quotas, which have been looked upon with such great anxiety by those engaged in the coal trade, is one of the examples of State action which I do not think right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite wish to copy. I do not suppose they wish to extend the quota system or prevent British coal going to foreign countries. They would be very glad if they could find anyone to buy our coal in any part of the world.
This brings me to the subject of quotas. Anxiety naturally has been shown in the coal trade regarding the
extension of the quota system in France. The increased import duties led to correspondence between ourselves and the French Government which was consummated by the abolition of the 15 per cent. sur-tax. We are grateful to the French Government for acceding to our request and accepting our reasons. At the same time, the German Government have been extending the pressure of the quota system, and they have now cut down the amount of British coal which may be admitted into Germany to a comparatively low level—the lowest at any time since the War. We, naturally, found ourselves compelled to communicate with the German Government and to express very strongly our view as to the effect that it is likely to have on the trade between Germany and England. We had to point out that it is contrary to the Commercial Treaty which exists between the two countries, and that, moreover, we could not allow any discrimination against this country—for the same strict quotas are not applied to other countries as are applied to ourselves—to pass unnoticed. I am not able to report to the Committee to-day the progress made, except to say that communications are passing between us, of course, on a very friendly basis, and that we hope before long to be able to announce that the German Government have eliminated the element of discrimination from their present policy.

Sir PERCY HARRIS: Can the right hon. Gentleman say what is the reason for that discrimination?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: It is a very simple one. Throughout the whole of last year Germany was anxious to cut down the amount of imports into her country, and, at the same time, keep her miners in employment. It began by a diminution in the amount of coal admitted into Germany, I think as far back as last summer. The figures of diminution, however, did not reach any seriously high level until the winter. They have gone up twice in two stages since then.

Sir P. HARRIS: But why the discrimination against this country?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am afraid I cannot enter sufficiently far into the mind of the German Government to know the reasons for their policy. The fact is that they imposed a more severe restriction upon
us than upon our competitors. These prohibitions and quota systems are obstacles to international trade, and I am bound to say directly affect one of our biggest industries, the coal trade, which is passing through as severe a depression as has ever been known. The remarkable thing is that the internal consumption of coal keeps up, and if we were to judge purely by employment figures it would he true to say that there were more people employed in the mining of coal in the first three months of this year than in the first three months of last year. I do not know the explanation except only the expansion of the home market, but it is a matter of satisfaction that, while the foreign trade has gone down, there appears to have been some increase in the home trade.

Mr. GEORGE HALL: For the first three months in this year, compared with the first three months of last year, I find that there were 50,000 fewer miners employed in the coal mining industry.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I will get the figures if the hon. Gentleman wants them. We do not want any dispute as to the facts. It surprised me very much when I saw the improvement in the figures. I shall be very glad to get them out in. detail and discuss them with the hon. Gentleman or any other hon. Members. The fact that impresses my mind most at the present time is that the industries which have been causing us the greatest anxiety—iron and steel, coal, marine engineering and shipbuilding show no material signs of improvement, especially in their foreign trade. Shipbuilding is down to a lower ebb than we have ever known. It is a remarkable fact that in the month of February only one order for a new ship was placed in the whole of our great shipbuilding yards. That is a very serious fact for those employed in the shipyards and in marine engine works, and there appears to be no chance of a revival in the shipbuilding industry until there is a marked revival in the traffic of the world as a whole. When that comes, it will take some time for the world to absorb the laid-up tannage which is now lying idle, and it is not until that stage has been passed that there is any likelihood of any great improvement in shipbuilding as a whole, although orders of a
special class may quite easily be placed from time to time.
I would like now to say something about a new departure in our Imperial policy, or, rather, an extension of our Imperial policy, which holds out a good deal of hope for us in the future. We are finding ourselves restricted in the trade of Europe; obstacles have been placed in the way of British imports finding their way into India; the state of China, although it has given a temporary spurt to British exports, is not likely to make a permanent demand for Lancashire goods in China towards which we can look with hope unless there is a complete restoration of law and order throughout the whole Chinese Empire. The prospect of our extending our markets in Europe has become smaller as the prohibitions to which I have referred have extended, and as the new States develop narrow, national economic policies without any consideration for their own wider interests or for the state of Europe as a whole. [Interruption.] We are not giving a lead in this matter. It is their own idea that these new States, set up under the Treaty of Versailles, should exist on a self-sufficing basis.
One thing is quite clear about the present policy of this country, and that is that we have no intention of trying to exist on a self-sufficing basis. We have within the confines of the British Empire the greatest possible variety of natural products; we have open markets or, at least, markets which are sentimentally inclined towards us; we have within our great range natural wealth of such variety and volume as to enable us, within the confines of the British Empire, to say that we are on a far more self-sufficing basis than other countries dare to aspire to. Before this summer is over, there will be a meeting at Ottawa of representatives of the Dominions and Colonies and of this country. We shall go to Ottawa with sentiment strongly in favour of Imperial action. We want to combine the interests of those who live in the various parts of the British Empire with the sentiment which binds them together. It is possible to do so on a basis which will not be, as some people imagine, merely a sordid haggling between States for preference advantages, but rather the conferring of benefits on those who are citizens of the British Empire.
We speak far too largely of what is done by this country, and by this Dominion and that, whereas in fact trade is conducted, not by States, but by individuals. We want to make it, not only the desire, but the interest of the individuals who are concerned in the organisation of industries throughout the British Empire to trade within that Empire, and particularly with us. We have advantages which we can give to them; they have great advantages which they can give to us. We are already making considerable progress in sorting out the industries in which their benefits can be conferred with the greatest advantage upon us, and they are working as far as they can at their own schedules, in which they are examining certain industries in which they think they can most help. These are simple, businesslike proposals, but they all point in one direction, and that is the direction of extending the area of trade within the Empire, freeing it from many of its obstacles, and making it a common interest for all alike to buy and sell more freely. We can do so with great success, I venture to say, within the confines of the British Empire, but we do not intend to end there. That is the first step. The next step is to extend the area of our world trade among those who are also ready to confer advantages upon us. By the development of an Imperial policy and a freer trade policy throughout the world, we get rid of many obstacles which now exist, choking the channels of traffic in Europe and elsewhere, and we hope to add to the general volume of exchange by buying and selling goods of every kind, raw materials and manufactures alike. These are prosaic matters, and, unless they are inspired by something more than the narrowest self-interest, they are not likely to lead us very far.

Colonel WEDGWOOD: Will the currency question be considered?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I think that all economic matters which concern the various countries composing the British Empire might well be discussed; I would not shut the door on anything. Of one thing I can assure my right hon. Friend, and that is that, in any efforts we make to extend the trade of the British Empire, we are not going to try to do so on a basis which would make us exclusive,
that is to say, would shut us off from the rest of the world. Do not let us put out of our minds the outlook of the Dominions themselves. You cannot imagine Canada, for instance, wishing to shut off her trade from the United States of America. She will, we trust, continue to extend the preferences which are already given to individual traders, merchants, manufacturers and producers alike in this country, but we must not imagine that this policy means that she is going to have nothing more to do with the United States of America, any more than it means that we are going to have nothing to do with the foreign countries in which we have most excellent and welcome customers. We must proceed by stages, and we have chosen the course of making our position secure in this country first. That we have already done. The next stage is to make sure that we can extend our traffic within the confines of the British Empire. That we hope to do, and, ultimately, to extend our trade along freer channels throughout the whole world.

Mr. ATTLEE: The House will have listened with a good deal of disappointment to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. I should have thought, in the situation of world trade, and the situation in which this country finds itself, that when the President of the Board of Trade in a National Government made a statement, we should have had something of a broad outlook, some attempt to explain world conditions, some idea of Government policy, and some appreciation of the things that matter. Instead, the right hon. Gentleman has contented himself, in the main, with playing up to the least intelligent of his supporters. He started on a, note of self-satisfaction and complacency, but, if he is really pleased with the signs of reviving trade at the present time, he is pleased with a very little. He gave us one or two instances, but even in these he was not consistent. He just threw off as a little aside the statement that there were some unsatisfactory signs in the situation. He said that there were no signs of anything happening to our advantage in the coal trade, which is a fairly important industry, or in shipbuilding, another very important industry, or in the cotton trade, but apart from these, he said, things are looking lovely in the garden. In order to fill out his speech, he proceeded to deal with
a number of trivial matters, and tried to trail his coat in the hope that Members on these benches would tread on it, but he got his corns trodden on instead, because he came up against someone who knew a good deal more about the matter than he did.
To anyone with a broad outlook, the picture given by the right hon. Gentleman was extremely gloomy. After telling us that this country's greatest trade was with Europe, he drew satisfaction from the fact that other European countries were in a worse condition than ourselves—that our principal customers were in a more ruinous condition than we were. Then he proceeded to contrast the condition of this country with the picture painted by the egregious Mr. Siegfried last summer, and said that he wished he could bring Mr. Siegfried over and show him this country. I have no doubt that Mr. Siegfried would be welcomed by hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite, because he did his work, which was extremely successful in adding to the financial crisis, by that steady process of depreciation of all things in this Country which has been carried on by them.
I will deal with one or two of the points which the right hon. Gentleman made, before drawing his attention to some of the things which I think really matter in the present outlook. He talked of new industries. It is, no doubt, very gratifying that new industries are going to be started in this country, but I would like to know why some of those industries were not started here before. The right hon. Gentleman suggests, of course, that it is all due to the tariff, but my impression is that the principal instance which he mentioned was one that I heard of a year ago, before there was any tariff at all.
4.30 p.m.
He proceeded to do what I am sure will arouse the ire of the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. Williams), namely, to launch a considerable attack on the enterprise of the British manufacturer and the British capitalist. He drew a picture of opportunities passing by our business men. With the hon. Member for South Croydon behind him, he took alarm and so launched an attack on State enterprise, and there he got more than he bargained for. Then he proceeded to talk about
squandering resources, and I was at once reminded of a passage in the Macmillan Report with regard to the squandering of resources. The right hon. Gentleman is now welcoming foreign capital into this country, and he says that British capital must be very carefully used, and must not be squandered. Has the right hon. Gentleman any proposal or information to put before the House with regard to the preservation of the interests of the British investor? We read in the Macmillan Report of companies which had raised a capital of £117,000,000, of which the market value had gone down to £66,000,000, representing a loss of 47 per cent. We read of the huge proportion of these companies which really had no assets at all; and, apparently, we are still to continue to allow the direction of capital into industry to be in the hands of such of these gentlemen as have not now come into State employment in His Majesty's prisons. On every occasion on which industrial matters have been discussed in the House, hon. and right hon. Gentlemen on the Government side have always told us that we must remember that there is a crisis on. We have so far had no statement whatever from the Government as to what is their policy for this country. We have only had emergency expedients introduced. They did not cover a Government policy. They were introduced as desirable things by certain Members of the Government, and at the same time they were recommended to us as thoroughly disastrous by other Members of the Government. Perhaps that is the reason why the right hon. Gentleman, who naturally holds a kind of middle position between the dissentient Liberals and the triumphant Tariff Reformers, gave us such a colourless statement. All he could do was to tell us that we were getting through our difficulties and to claim success for some of the legislation that he had introduced. All he has done, as came out at the end of his speech, was to follow the example of the less enlightened States of Europe —a kind of industrial Balkanisation. The attitude of the National Government has been most admirably described in a book by Sir Arthur Salter called "Recovery," which I hope will be very widely read. I suppose he is one of the
most distinguished servants of the world, and he is a man who speaks with impartiality and detachment:
Everywhere men fly to new tariffs and restrictions, to nationalist policies, domestic currencies, parochial purchasing, and personal hoarding, like frightened rabbits each scurrying to his own burrow.
The right hon. Gentleman, first of all, gave us the scurrying to our little burrow here, and the only mitigation of it that he suggested was that we should all scurry into a larger burrow called the Empire.
I wish to look at this matter of our trade from two positions, the immediate crisis which we recognise we have to meet, the depression in our industry, its consequent unemployment, its difficulties in currency, exchange and everything else. We all admit that storm. I also want to consider the general post-War developments of British industry, what I might call the permanent wave from which we suffer. I want to consider these phenomena from three different points of view: first of all, the economic position of the country as a unit of wealth production; and, secondly, from the point of view of the unemployment problem. Those two are not exactly identical problems. You can have a very great increase in the production of wealth without having any comparable increase in employment. That is what you have been having in the last 10 years and what you have in the world. Thirdly, I want to discuss it from the point of view of the local distribution of unemployment and the local distribution of declining and of new industrial activities.
Take, first of all, the question of the immediate crisis. We have followed in the crisis the habits of what we used to consider the least experienced and enlightened nations in restricting imports. During the last three months, judging by the last returns that we have had, our imports have fallen by £16,000,000. You may say that is a great effort to try to restore our balance of trade, and that although we managed to increase our importation of raw materials by rather more than £2,500,000. At the same time, in those same three months, the export of the produce of this country has fallen by £11,000,000, so that, when you look at that £16,000,000, all but £5,000,000 merely means that our busi-
ness as a trading nation has gone down, and that only £5,000,000 represents any redress of the balance of trade. It is merely a fall in international trade.
I have been looking at the figures to see what is happening in the world generally. The right hon. Gentleman gave us a series of figures about what is happening in Germany and other countries, and he seemed to take comfort from it. I cannot conceive why he should. I suppose, if he was carrying on trade as a village baker, the bankruptcy and failure of all the other people in the village would cause him to dance with joy. See what has happened. Imports and exports in January, 1932, as compared with the average for 1931, show a general decrease all the way round. Germany's imports go down by 23 per cent., and her exports by 31 per cent., Austria 27 per cent. and 46 per cent., France's imports go down by 35 per cent. and her exports by 29 per cent., and Canada's imports go down by 35 per cent. and her exports by 25 per cent. The story is repeated right the way through. In the scramble for the trade balance the only real effect is that you are steadily bringing world trade to a standstill. The imports that are falling off are broadly from those nations that are our best customers—Germany, the Argentine, Australia, France, India, Canada and so forth. It is apparently some cause for rejoicing because we are not so badly off as they are. The real trouble all through with regard to the crisis and the balance of trade has been the falling off of our exports, visible and invisible.
The next point to which I call attention is that we have this fall in international trading all the world over and that, of course, has had an enormous effect on our unemployment figures. What is the good of the right hon. Gentleman playing with the unemployment figures and making little suggestions about this and that trade? He has not dealt in the least with the broad problem. The broad problem is that, during these two years of economic blizzard, of our increased figures of unemployment, 900,000 are directly due to the falling off of our export trade. I want to know what the right hon. Gentleman is doing in the way of policy to try to restore our export trade. It is no good saying it is true we have lost a great deal of our export
trade in coal, iron and steel, but cotton is slightly better—though even so it is £1,000,000 below 1930—but only because of the anti-Japanese boycott. What is the good of making a great parade of those figures and not facing the real question which is the very heavy fall in our big exports? What is the good of telling us that two or three factories are to be built here and there? It may be a nice little swallow, but it does not make a summer.
Have the Government any idea of whither we are tending in industry? I should like to know whether the Cabinet has ever sat down seriously to discuss the trade position. If not, I hope the right hon. Gentleman will insist that they should do so. I know the Prime Minister will not like it, but the right hon. Gentleman must try to bring him up to the scratch. Further, has the right hon. Gentleman any industrial plan for the future of the country? Having built up this country on the basis of certain great industries, mainly for export, we are utterly failing to recover our trade and to bring employment to the people in those trades. Our export of cotton piece goods has come down to 1,716,000 as against 7,057,000 in 1913. That is a terrific fall. There is a slight pull up this year, but, taking the peak year, 1929, we scarcely exported half in quantity of what we did in 1913. Our iron and steel exports in 1929 were 4.3 as against 4.9 in 1913 an actual decrease in volume. You have a similar shrinkage in coal.
We sometimes hear people talking as if everything would be all right if we got back to 1929 prices and 1929 conditions. It only shows what comparison can do. If you are living in very miserable circumstances and see some circumstances which are not quite as miserable as your own, you begin to think that is quite palatial by comparison with your own. Let us suppose that we manage to get back to 1929, or even to 1913, and recapture the markets that we lost for our coal, iron and steel products, cotton, wool, shipbuilding and the chief export industries. Suppose that we produced actually as much as we did in 1913, we should not have solved the unemployment problem because of the extraordinary increase in productivity. I do not know what attention the Government have given to the Macmillan Report. It
was overshadowed by another report that came out shortly afterwards, but the figures with regard to productivity are most extraordinary. In all the principal industries, coal, iron, steel, engineering and textiles, you find the productivity per person employed increasing in a short space of time by an enormous percentage. That followed on a very big increase from the pre-War days to post-War days—

Whereupon the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod being come with a Message, the CHAIRMAN left the Chair.

Mr. SPEAKER resumed the Chair.

ROYAL ASSENT.

Message to attend the Lords Commissioners.

The House went; and, having returned,

Mr. SPEAKER reported the Royal Assent to—

Transitional Payments Prolongation (Unemployed Persons) Act, 1932.

SUPPLY.

Again considered in Committee.

[Sir DENNIS HERBERT in the Chair.]

Question again proposed:
That a sum, not exceeding £84,690, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade, and Subordinate Departments, including certain Services arising out of the War.

Mr. ATTLEE: When our proceedings were interrupted I was about to draw the attention of the Committee to the very remarkable figures as to increased output per worker, shown in the Macmillan Report. Take coal-mining. In the five years from 1924 to 1929, you find a 27 per cent. increased productivity; in iron and steel 20 per cent.; in engineering and shipbuilding, including motors, 15 per cent.; leather and boots, 26 per cent. That is the position which faces industry after industry. Even if we got back to 1929, or to the 1913 position, with regard to our export trade, we could not anywhere near employ the people who are looking for employment in these particular industries. Yet we still hear great
talk of our need for increased production. The same thing is happening all over the world. Industry after industry is being rationalised, the powers of production are increasing, and the world has not up to the present devised a means for consuming the extra production.
5.0 p.m.
What is the President of the Board of Trade doing? He is going to take care to increase production in just those particular departments where over-production is already going on. That will be the only effect of his import scheme. He is going to introduce into this country the manufacture of articles which were formerly produced somewhere else. Every other country is doing the same thing. I have an enormous list here of country after country—Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary and so forth—all engaged in setting up tariff barriers of one sort and another. I have no doubt that in those countries the equivalents to the right hon. Gentleman have come down to their Parliaments and announced with joy that they were going to produce something formerly produced in other countries. The only result is to multiply the plants and the number of producers of commodities without finding any market for those commodities, and as a policy for facing the present world conditions, that strikes me as being absolutely ludicrous.
A word on the policy which has resulted in increased productivity. It is generally known as rationalisation. It is the rationalisation of industry and the irrationalisation of the national life. What is the right hon. Gentleman doing with regard to reorganisation by industries, first of all, because every report states that there is to be reorganisation by industries? We have had reports on cotton, we have had various attempts at reorganisation in the coal industry, and we have had proposals with regard to the iron and steel industry. The right hon. Gentleman told us nothing about that, and I should like to know whether any negotiations are taking place with the trades concerned. With regard to iron and steel, the statement made by one authority, Professor Bone, is this:
Unless world conditions speedily improve, ere long we may have seriously to consider in the national interests a reorganisation of our iron and steel industry
on 'public utility' lines, with some element of effective public control, with a view to more scientific management and development, reasonable prices for standardized products, and proper international arrangements regarding outputs. For the production of iron and steel to meet the world's demands is fast becoming an international question of the first magnitude, in which all the chief producing countries are equally concerned.
That is a statement of opinion by a distinguished professor. We hear from time to time questions about what is going to be done with regard to iron and steel, and the reply given from the Government is that it is a very difficult matter. So it is. As this professor says:
The really important question for this country now to decide is at (or up to) what stage or to what extent in such production as a whole does or will it best pay us to import unfinished material in order profitably to turn it into a finished one.
We want to know what is the Government policy. When we had a Debate on steel we had a question put up by the steel manufacturers, and we never got a clear answer as to what the Government proposed to do. We do not know whether they are going to insist on any reorganisation. We at times have a wail about the cotton trade, but we do not know whether the Government propose to take a hand in its reorganisation; and the right hon. Gentleman comes here and gives no hint that he has any idea with regard to the reorganisation of industry at all.
I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman or the hon. Gentleman has read much of recent publications on these topics. In the "Times" of to-day there is a long article, and also a leading article, on this question of a national planning of industry. We find from speaker after speaker in the country and in this House references to this question of national planning. You have, in the book to which I have already referred, the whole question put to this country as to what is going to be its industrial future. The writer says that we cannot depend any longer on the old fashioned laissez faire idea that things will work out for themselves. We hat e to consider the fact that the Russians have a Five Years Plan, and we have to consider whether or not we are going to have a plan in this country.
If I had put forward as a suggestion this need of a national plan quite a short
time ago, such Members as were present would all have had Russia in their minds, and they would all have said, "Oh, the Russians, with their ridiculous Five Years Plan." As a matter of fact, the tune has changed entirely, and in every country people are now beginning to say, "Is not the Russian Five Years Plan going to succeed, and what are we going to do about it?" I was speaking yesterday to a man who has just returned from a tour in the United States of America, and he said that all the young industrialists there are learning all they can about the Five Years Plan, and even in the United States there are questions as to whether any longer they can go on in the old style or whether they should not have some kind of plan. That is also the burden of Sir Arthur Salter's book, to a large extent—the need of an international economic plan and a national economic plan.
I think that on this occasion we ought to have had some kind of statement made by the right hon. Gentleman as to whether the Government have any plan for the future of this country. Have they worked out any idea as to how this country is going to retain its position in the world of industry? Have they any plan worked out for the various parts of the country? I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman has seriously considered the possibility of calling together a body of people and thinking out the industrial future of this country in relation to the geographical distribution of the population and our national resources. The right hon. Gentleman has told us that it is very significant that the great majority of these new industries that are being set up in this country are being set up in the London area. He said that one or two were being set up in the depressed areas. That is not what has been happening during the past five years.
I have here a plan got out by an exceedingly competent economist, showing exactly what has been happening to the new and expanding industries in this country. He has drawn a map, on the one side, of unemployment, showing its geographical distribution. If you look at that map, you will see the dark blots of extreme unemployment in Lanarkshire, Glasgow, the North East coast, South Lancashire and Yorkshire, and South Wales, all black; and, broadly speaking,
the lighter parts of the map are in South East England and the South Midlands. On the other side, you find where new and expanding industry is taking place, and the great dark areas, showing the greatest intensity of new development, are around London and the South Midlands and the South Eastern counties. If you put those two maps together, you will find that practically in only one case does new industry coincide with excessive unemployment, and that is on Tees-side, where you have the development of the chemical industry, but everywhere else you find that, so far from the new industries coming in to take the place of declining industries, they are going to other districts.
Cannot something be done with regard to that development? I should have thought that at a time when we are told that we must economise, that would be something that a National Government would do. I do not know whether the hon. Member can tell us anything with regard to the surveys that were to be made of depressed areas. I suggested it myself, and the idea was taken up under the Labour Government by the then President of the Board of Trade, the late Mr. William Graham. A survey was made in these depressed areas, and measures were taken to devise means for bringing new and expanding industries into districts where trade has declined. The most economic thing to be done is to bring industry to the people in the houses, plants and factories that are there already, rather than havng to shift the people and make new factories in different parts of the country.
Nothing can be done unless some active, energetic control is undertaken, and I want to know whether any steps are being taken in that direction. It may be that it might need legislative sanction, but there are various things that could be done by the way. The President of the Board of Trade could get into touch with the Minister of Transport. He will find that on the Continent a great deal has been done with regard to making transport facilities and stimulating industry in the particular localities where you want it. There is the question of the ports. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman realises that by their tariff legislation the Government are upsetting the port
arrangements of this country. There are grave fears lest the method of dues on imported goods is not going to upset the relative position of the ports, quite haphazard, without any reference to any plan. There is the question of the migration and the housing of workers, because sometimes you get expanding industries which cannot expand because there is no place for the workers to go to.
Finally, on this point, I come to the right hon. Gentleman's own pet proposals. The Government's particular fancy is tariffs. There is one thing that might be done, even under tariffs, which we have urged. Given that you are to have tariffs, why not use them as an instrument for directing the economic life of this country? You may say that that is a Socialist idea, but Sir Arthur Salter, in his recent book, says:
A strong and competent Government might stimulate and assist reorganisation of an industry by offering a temporary and conditional tariff, but the conditions would need to be clearly defined and rigorously enforced.
On the whole question of industrial reorganisation, this authority states:
Programmes of industrial production again need obviously to be based upon collective estimates and to be subject where necessary in their execution to some collective influence.
That is what we are seeking. I am afraid the hon. Member opposite has not really accepted that doctrine. I remember that when a question was asked by an hon. Member from the Conservative side as to whether he would help one of these industrial development associations, he said that he could not; that it would be quite wrong to help one more than another, to favour one part of the country at the expense of another. I submit that in these days that is entirely wrong. The Board of Trade or some organisation set up by the Board of Trade, like a council of industry, has got to take direction of these things if we are to get even a little way out of our present difficulties. I think it is a point of very great importance. We on this side do not think you can effectively reorganise world economics or the economic structure of this country under your present system, but we suggest that you should have a try. Sir Arthur Salter says:
No one can suspect that even if we now get through without disaster, we can long
avoid social disintegration and revolution on the widest scale if we have only a prospect of recurring depressions, perhaps of increasing violence. We have indeed before us only the alternatives of collective leadership, collective control, or chaos.
As far as I can see, there is no collective control by the National Government at present. In fact, they are formed upon a basis of limited liability to support the policies of people whose economic ideas are as the poles asunder and which policies are temporarily needed for a specific purpose. Whatever may have been the policy in the crisis—it is not my purpose to say Whether it was good or bad—at any rate there is nothing like a continuous plan. If hon. Gentlemen opposite in control were of the same mind we might get a plan even if it were a bad plan, but as long as we have Ministers holding the opinions of those on the opposite benches I am afraid that we shall not get it. We consider that it is possible, if the Government will bend their minds to it, to take some thought for the economic future of this country. The right hon. Gentleman might consider with the Minister of Transport the condition of transport facilities, and he might consider with the Ministry of Health who already has the amenity planning control, the industrial planning control and bring the two together.
Above all, and finally to return to the point which was made by the right hon. Gentleman, there is the question of squandering resources. We know that the right hon. Gentleman is very sensitive about the care of the savings of the people. He told us so at the election time, and he told the country so. He was very careful lest the wicked Socialists should squander the money which the people had put by. No doubt he was very angry. Has he no class sympathy for his own people who invest their money? Unless you take some control and direction of the money and investments of this country and see that they go into a line in which they will develop the economic life of the country you will create a position worse than any position of which this party has ever been accused of being guilty of creating. I appeal to the hon. Member when he replies to try and deal with the matter on broad lines and to realise that all over the country many people of very different opinions realise—and, indeed,
all over the world there is a feeling—that it is time that some more orderly thought and control was put into the industrial life of this country and of the world. The arguments that apply to the world situation to which hon. Members might devote themselves when they come to talk about foreign trade are exactly as applicable to this country. Unless you have better organisation you cannot deal with the problem of your distressed areas, and you will have unemployment continuing as badly as in 1929, if not quite as bad as it is to-day.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: I was intensely surprised to hear the hon. Gentleman who spoke on behalf of the Opposition blaming the Government for a lack of policy. He said that they had announced no policy, and he blamed them for not having announced a particular policy for dealing with the crisis which it is admitted, at present exists in this country. When the financial crisis was upon this country the Government initiated a policy and carried it out. It was one with which the hon. Gentleman now that he is in Opposition does not agree, but with which in the main he did agree when he was a member of the late Socialist Government.

Mr. ATTLEE: The hon. and gallant Member must excuse me. I was never a member of the Cabinet and I never took part in any discussion whatever on the matter. He is entirely mistaken.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: I apologise to the hon. Gentleman for making a mistake in that respect. It was a policy with which the members of the Socialist Government were in the main in agreement when they formed the Government of that time. Now the hon. Gentleman is blaming the Government because they still have no policy. I ask him whether the Abnormal Importations Act, with its restriction on foreign imports, the Revenue tariff of 10 per cent., and the setting up of the Tariff Commission with the object of protecting the industries of this country where they require such protection, the extension of an Imperial policy for the extension of our export trade, and the greater freedom of trade between every part of the Empire, the substitution of markets in the Empire for markets which we have lost on the Continent, do not constitute a policy?

Mr. ATTLEE: No.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: I will make the hon. Gentleman a present of his opinion, but in the opinion of the country it is undoubtedly a policy, a policy which has changed the whole fiscal system of the country, because we have definitely abandoned the old free imports policy and are taking the first step, which is only the prelude to further steps, in the protection of the industries of this country. And we have embarked upon the greatest policy of all—the policy of Empire Free Trade or, if you will, Imperial economic unity in order to bring about the greatest possible freedom of trade throughout the Empire and by that means, with the power we obtain, to beat down the tariffs throughout the world which everyone admits are such a dire hindrance to world trade at the present time. The hon. Gentleman also rather objected to the setting up of foreign factories in this country. He talked of a swallow not making a summer. [Interruption.]

Sir S. CRIPPS: I said that the hon. Gentleman did not object to the swallow because it did not make a summer.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: I am glad that he did not object, because one swallow in this policy will lead to many others, and the summer will undoubtedly arrive in due course. He criticised the smallness of the measures which have been taken. He said that the President of the Board of Trade had no right to take any satisfaction to himself because we were in a better position now than any other country in the world, as it was nothing to be proud of. He does not seem to realise that we have to make a beginning, and that it is a very great advance in this country that, despite the deplorable conditions throughout the world, we, at any rate, are beginning to show an advance in the direction of an increase of our trade.
I wish to deal particularly with the Abnormal Importations Act and the effect it has had upon the imports and exports of commodities which come under the Act, and also with regard to the effect it has had upon unemployment. We have been told that the question of tariffs is an experiment. I grant that the Abnormal Importations Act, with the
very high tariff it imposes of 50 per cent., is more in the nature of a prohibitory tariff than of a general tariff in the ordinary sense of the word for the protection of our industries. But that tariff was brought in for a specific purpose, and it will shortly be altered in accordance with what is considered necessary. At any rate, the experiment has been launched, and it will be tested upon the results it gives to this country, whether on the whole it has been to the benefit of the country or not. I am prepared to stand by such a test. It is the best and the only test, but it can only properly be tried out provided that it is applied, not to a few of the industries of the country, but generally over the whole range of industries, including the greatest industry, agriculture, wherever it may be required.
I will come back to the Abnormal Importations Act, and take the question of imports first. In the month of March, 1930, of the commodities now coming under the Abnormal Importations Act we imported £3,947,812 worth; in 1931 we imported practically the same amount, £3,685,229 worth; but in March, 1932, when the Abnormal Importations Act had been in operation for a few months, we had dropped down to an import of only £705,992. That means that for the month of March, 1932, the imports had dropped by nearly £3,000,000 compared with March of the previous year, and by over £3,000,000 compared with March of the preceding year. In fact, the imports of the commodities affected by the Act have practically been wiped out. Therefore, the effect of the duties under the Abnormal Importations Act in restricting imports has been achieved. The drop in imports has been of a general character over the whole range of the commodities.
I will give the Committee some of the details of the reduction of those imports, as they are very interesting and important. In regard to garments, in the month of March, 1931, we imported £713,000 worth. In March of this year we imported only £166,000 worth. In cotton manufactures, which were mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman, we imported in March, 1931, £607,000 worth, and in March, 1932, £49,000 worth. In woollen manufactures there was a still more extraordinary drop. Last year there were
£779,000 worth and this year £56,000 worth. In woollen yarns there were £286,000 worth, and now only £4,000 worth. We have practically wiped out the imports of woollen yarns. In typewriters and parts the imports dropped from £55,000 to £10,000; glass bottles from £45,000 to £8,000, and domestic glass-wear from £144,000 to £17,000. This reduction in imports will be of little use to this country unless it can be shown that the gap which has been created by the restriction of foreign imports has been filled by the products of British industry and British labour. If that can be shown, we shall have achieved a great object by increasing home production and increasing employment in our country. The President of the Board of Trade enumerated the number of applications which had been made for the setting up of foreign factories and stated that some 70 odd are in the course of construction, or, of being enlarged. There have been repeated statements in the Press of factories which are being extended in this country, in which short time was previously worked, and in which full time is now being worked, and in others in which overtime is being worked. All these things go to show that British production has been increased, and that British labour is being employed to a greater extent than it has been employed previously.
5.30 p.m.
I should now like to turn to the statistics in regard to this matter. Of the groups covered by the Abnormal Importations Act figures of unemployment are given in the case of 12 groups in the Ministry of Labour Gazette. The others are not given. An examination of those figures give some very remarkable results. Taking the period from November to February, for the last three years, we find that from November, 1929, to February, 1930, unemployment increased in those 12 groups by 93,000, an increase of 53.6 per cent. From November, 1930, to February, 1931, unemployment increased in those 12 groups by 24,000. But if we take the same period, that is from November, 1931, to February, 1932, the period covered by the operations of the Abnormal Importations Act, we find that not only has unemployment not increased but that it has fallen by 36,000. That figure is the more remarkable because at
this time of the year I think it is generally the case that unemployment increases. In the two previous years that was the case to a very large extent, but, due to the operations of the Act instead of having this normal increase in unemployment, we have a decrease of 36,000.
These 12 groups comprise cotton, woo], worsted, linen, jute, hosiery, carpets, tailoring, dressmaking, pottery and earthenware, glass bottles, linoleum and oilcloth. These groups are the only ones covered by the Act for which the Ministry of Labour give the official statistics as regards unemployment, but they are sufficiently numerous and they are of sufficient importance to show that the demand which has been created, due to the restriction of foreign imports, has been met by increased production of home commodities and increased employment of our own people. Of that, surely, even Members of the Socialist party cannot entirely disapprove. This policy, or lack of policy as they call it, must be a matter of some satisfaction, in that we have increased employment for our people and increased home production. The hon. Member who has just spoken from the Front Opposition Bench asked what we are doing to increase our export trade. Surely he must know that before we can increase our export trade it is absolutely essential that we should have the vast proportion of our own home market, because by increased production, by the greater output of the industries of this country, we can reduce our overhead charges, and reduce the price of the article we have to sell, thereby competing on fairer terms and with more chance of success with the foreign article which is made at a far lower cost of production than exists in this country at the present time.
Let me turn to the export of the items covered by the Act. The export market is still in a very bad condition. Everybody realises that, but it is a great satisfaction to me to know how well we are holding our own in this matter. Although it may not be much satisfaction to the hon. Member who has just spoken, it is a matter on which we can congratulate ourselves. If we turn to the exports for the first quarter of 1930 and 1931, we find that the exports fell in that quarter from £45,000,000 in 1930, to £24,000,000 in 1931,
a drop of £21,000,000. The fall from the first quarter of 1931 to the first quarter in 1932, when the Abnormal Importations Act was in operation, was only £635,000, compared with the £21,000,000 fall in the previous year. Therefore, it is fair to assume that this very satisfactory check, this almost complete wiping out of the fall in our export trade, has been directly due to the Abnormal Importations Act and the protection of British industries.
Not only have the facts and figures which I have given this afternoon shown that the operations of that Act has increased home production and restricted foreign imports, almost entirely eliminating them, but that they have also increased our export trade. These are things that the Free Trader said would never happen; but you cannot get away from facts. The hon. Member who has just resumed his seat told us about the development of manufacturing industries in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and other countries on the Continent, which were created behind a, tariff wall. He asked what they were doing with their exports. Some tell him they were flooding the British market with them and preventing British goods from being sold, but on account of the operations of the Abnormal Importations Act that condition of things no longer prevails in regard to the articles covered by the Act. It is because of that Act that we have been able to cut out those imports, to obtain the market for ourselves and to increase British employment. These facts and figures should be a matter of congratulation for the President of the Board of Trade for his courage and foresight in bringing forward the Abnormal Importations Act, and also for those who made it possible for him to do so. They reflect great credit upon him. These results should be a lesson and an encouragement to the Government to go forward in the course which they have taken, in order to improve British trade and British employment, not only by protecting those articles which come under the Abnormal Importations Act but by protecting all the industries of this country where protection is necessary, including the main industry of agriculture.
I was very pleased to hear the President of the Board of Trade expounding the policy of greater inter-Imperial trade, the great ideal for which I twice have
stood. When I first did so, I was a sort of pariah dog, proclaiming something which was quite impossible, something outside the realms of practical politics, but within 14 months it is the accepted policy of the National Government of this country. I take no credit for that.

Mr. MAXTON: Beaverbrook has not accepted it yet.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: Oh, yes, he has. I believe in that policy, I stood for it because I believed in it, but I take no credit for it, and I am only too delighted to be able to stand here to-day proclaiming that it is now the policy of the National Government. It is the spirit with which every representative of the Empire, who goes to Ottawa will he imbued that will govern the benefits which will accrue from the Conference that is to meet in that great city of Canada. There we can, without the slightest doubt, obtain from the great units of the Empire a far greater proportion of their markets than we have at the present time. It is there that we shall increase our export trade. By the tariff that will be introduced, which we shall be able to use, against the foreigner, we shall be able to reduce the foreign tariffs. After the Ottawa Conference we shall be able to come to trade agreements with the foreigner, in order to obtain a greater proportion of his market than we have at the present time. I congratulate the President of the Board of Trade on the action which he has taken up to the present, and I hope that the Government will go forward with courage and continue the policy of protection for our industries and of inter-Imperial trade, which so far has had such beneficial results for the people of this country.

Mr. DUNCAN GRAHAM: It must be reassuring to the Cabinet, after the speech of the hon. and gallant Member, that they are absolutely sure of the support of the "Daily Express" and Lord Beaverbrook. In opening the Debate, the right hon. Gentleman made reference to what he called the crisis. Reference was also made to it by the hon. and gallant Member who has just spoken. I have been a Member of this House for a considerable number of years, and I was here last July. I have heard a lot about the crisis, but the Socialist leader of the
so-called National Government was afraid to meet the ordinary Members of the Labour party and tell them whether there was or was not a crisis in August of last year. I was not a Member of the Cabinet or an official of the Government, but just an ordinary Member of this House, and I came back here, notwithstanding the wild lies and the rest of it that were used last October to further the progress of the so-called Socialist-pseudo-Liberal-Tory-National Government. We were asked by the hon. and gallant Member to believe that everything is well with the country now, because of the incoming of this Government.

Vice-Admiral TAYLOR: I did not say that all is well. We are getting on to the right path. We have made a start.

Mr. GRAHAM: We were on the right path in 1924, when the hon. and gallant Member was not a Member of this House. The Labour party were in office in 1924. At that time the Prime Minister was a Socialist. [Interruption.] I was willing to admit that he was a Socialist at that time, but I am doubtful of it now. At that time the Labour Government lasted for only nine or ten months. The present Government have been in office almost as long as the Labour Government were in office in 1924, I should like to call attention to the condition of the industry with which I am and many Members of my party are connected. I should like to contrast its condition in 1924 with its condition to-day. The right hon. Gentleman did not take much credit to the Government for the position of the mining industry. He admitted that there was very little improvement. Indeed, it is not a question of any improvement; the industry is in a worse condition now due to the policy pursued by this Government. It we can depend upon the figures which have been issued the number of men employed in the industry has decreased. On 18th March, 1930, my hon. Friend asked a question as to the number of men employed and he received a reply which stated that there were 1,213,724 persons employed in the mining industry. In the statistical abstract issued by the Mines Department for 31st December, 1931, I find that the number of persons employed was 799,374, a decrease of 414,350, or 33 per cent. That is about the number of men the mining industry gave to the country in the
Great War, in addition to supplying the necessary fuel for carrying on the Great War. The reward they have received is that a large proportion of them have to go about idle, and have been so for anything from three years to six years.
I want to deal with the figures in regard to what are known as the exporting areas, that is to say, South Wales, Scotland, Northumberland, Durham and, to a lesser extent, Yorkshire. In 1924, when a Labour Government was in office, there were 250,055 persons employed in South Wales, but at the end of December last year there were 139,089, a reduction of 110,966, or 44 per cent. That is to say, 56 men are now working in South Wales where 100 men were working in 1921. The position has not improved during the last three months, on the contrary, it has got worse. In Scotland, in 1924, there were 141,805 persons employed in the mining industry and in December last year the number was 81,787, or 60,018 less. That is to say, where 100 men were working in 1924 there are only 62 working now. In Northumberland the decrease is over 40 per cent. as compared with 1924. In Durham the decrease is 33 per cent. and in Yorkshire 19 per cent. Over all these five areas, these exporting areas, there has been a decrease of 294,516 in the number of persons employed, or a decrease of 35 per cent. Some hon. Members on this side of the Committee who are connected with the industry meet the results of it every week-end, and up to a certain point there will no doubt be a considerable amount of sympathy amongst the Tory-Liberal-Socialist - National - Labour Government, but it is impossible for anyone who does not come into direct contact with these men to understand the situation.
These figures cover a period of seven years, and if any hope of any improvement in the condition had been given by the President of the Board of Trade this afternoon there is not a single Member on these benches who would not have applauded his remarks. But the right hon. Gentleman holds out no hope whatever. He knows that there is no hope. We are not going to blame the Germans or the Poles or the French. They are doing exactly what we are doing ourselves, and they are perfectly entitled to safeguard their own interests. It is part of the price we have to pay
for a tariff. The mining industry bore the burden during the War and has borne the burden since the War up to the present day. The President of the Board of Trade was a Member of the Government which started the War, and everybody knows that the industry with which he is connected did extremely well. It would pay to have another war. The right hon. Gentleman was also largely responsible for preventing any undue profits being made by the mining industry because he was the Minister in charge at the time when maximum prices were fixed for coal.
While the mining industry was largely responsible for providing the fuel which enabled the War to be carried on to a more or less successful conclusion and contributed something like 400,000 men to the State, almost immediately the War was ended it was attacked and the miners were compelled to stand out for three months. They had only just recovered from that three months' attack when they were again attacked for nearly nine months, and I am not exaggerating when I say that from 1920 up to the present time the mining industry has been treated as though it was something in the nature of an alien in Great Britain. It is an industry which can only be dealt with on a national basis, and if this were a National Government it would be treated in this way. But there is no indication, and never has been any indication, that the present Government is a National Government really Animated by a desire to safeguard the interests of the working classes generally throughout the country. It was not an economic or an industrial crisis last August so much as a political crisis.
My hon. Friend the Member for Lime-house (Mr. Attlee) offered a number of suggestions to the Government, although a Socialist is one of those fellows who is not supposed to have a constructive mind. There are a, number of things which might be done. I think the mining industry, being a national industry, ought to be represented in the Government by a Secretary of State and not by a Minister subject to the decisions of a Cabinet of which he is not a member. If this were a National Government something would be done to provide the Admiralty with British coal insteal of oil from foreign countries, although that oil is
largely produced by British capital. The Department for which we pay considerable millions of pounds every year might very well to its advantage and to the advantage of the mining industry buy the coal that is necessary for fuelling purposes in Britain and put a considerable number of men who are now idle in employment again. The right hon. Gentleman made a reference to the new men who have been put in employment since the present Government took office. He gave us the numbers in Lancashire and Yorkshire and on the North-Fast coast, but he took good care to make no reference to Scotland or to South Wales. I happen to have the figures published in a book issued by a Socialist body, and it gives the number of persons who have been employed afresh during the period of this Government. I find that there are something like 310,400 new entrants into industry, and they are principally to be found in such industries as the motor industry, cycle industry, printing and bookbinding, furniture and upholstery, the miscellaneous metal trades, electrical cables, electrical engineering, the chemical trades, rubber, mechanical instruments, the manufacture of scientific and photographic apparatus, and certain other industries of that kind.
6.0. p.m.
Of all these people who have been employed, 89,950 have been employed in London and 42,190 have been employed in Birmingham. That was part of the payment which Birmingham got from the Tory Government. Between them, London, Birmingham, Manchester and Coventry employ 56 per cent. of the numbers which I have given. London, Birmingham and Coventry employ 47 per cent. or roughly one-half of the total of new entrants. Yet last month the unemployment rate increased in London and in Birmingham, and in March, according to the unemployment index, there was not a single county in England, Scotland or Wales with a percentage of unemployment less than 10, so that the improvement is not as great as the right hon. Gentleman would like to make us believe.
I do not know what reply the Under-Secretary is going to make, but I know that he is in a different position to-day from that which he was in a year ago.
He is not so "cocky" to-day as he was when he was denouncing the Labour Government. He has to defend himself and his Government now, and the months as they pass will make it more and more difficult to defend the position of this Government, particularly with regard to the industry to which I am referring, unless there is a considerable change. I would be very pleased indeed, and my colleagues belonging to that industry, who are in the House of Commons by the same right as every other Member, would also be very pleased, if the National Government could give us any indication that there is going to be any improvement in conditions in the mining industry. Otherwise, I fear that the difficulties through which the country has passed during the last few years will be nothing in comparison to the difficulties which it will have to face in the next five or six years.

Mr. LEWIS JONES: If I may make special reference to two of the speeches which have been delivered this afternoon I would say that I was much impressed both by the general review of the situation given by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, and by the speech of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Limehouse (Mr. Attlee). I wish to refer to some of the things which were said by the hon. Member for Limehouse, and I shall do so, not in any critical spirit, because when the hon. Gentleman makes a contribution to these discussions I, personally, am always impressed by the attitude which he adopts towards industrial questions and particularly industrial organisation. He dealt with the twin problems of overproduction and under-consumption. The whole world knows that these are the big problems which we must gradually get over before we can solve the general industrial depression. There are different points of view as to the proper solution. Hon. Members below the Gangway have the definite policy that the way of solution is to increase the power of consumption of the masses of the people. The hon. Member for Limehouse, however, dealt definitely this afternoon with the question of the development of unemployment, in spite of the increased ratio of production per individual employed in industry, and it is well that
the Committee should realise that this is a growing and serious problem in industry in this country.
Economists have coined a new term during the last few years to describe this kind of unemployment, which is a result of improved methods of production. They call it "technological unemployment." It is becoming a growing menace to the working people of this country. It is all very well to talk about planning industry on a national or international scale; it is all very well to talk about rationalisation and regionalisation of industry, but every piece of rationalisation that takes place, results in the displacement of labour and, unfortunately, in industry we have to be prepared for that. One of the inevitable results of rationalisation is to reduce the number of people employed. In the country generally I believe there is very often a misuse of the word "rationalisation." A number of people seem to think that the word "rationalisation" has some relation to the word "ration." The public, one of these days, will have to realise that rationalisation simply means doing something in a rational or scientific way. If we are to conduct our industry on more rational lines, it means that we have to conduct it on a more scientific basis, and the more scientific is the control of industry and production, the less is the amount of labour employed to produce commodities. The consequence is technological unemployment.
I have my own ideas as to how we can get over that difficulty in time. In all probability the hen Gentleman the Member for Limehouse and I are as the poles asunder in our difference of view on the method to be adopted. I believe, however, that some development along the lines of national planning, as suggested by the hon. Gentleman, has to take place during the next few years and it is possible that, when we have developed such a scheme, we shall have to deal with the unemployment which results from that planning, by reducing the hours of work per day of the workers. It was also suggested by the hon. Gentleman—and on this point I wish to cross swords with him—that no steps had been taken in this country in the direction of organising or planning industry. We know that in the cotton industry definite steps have been taken in the direction of reorganisation. We know that in the ship-
building industry very definite steps have been taken in that direction also. In the steel industry, in the north of England in particular and throughout the country generally, there have been definite steps towards planning and reorganisation.

Mr. ATTLEE: I did not say that no steps had been taken towards the rationalisation or organisation of particular industries. I said that there had been no steps towards the national planning of industry as a whole.

Mr. JONES: I should be sorry to do the hon. Gentleman an injustice. I take it then that what he wished to convey to the Committee was that there had been no scheme of national planning to deal with the country as a whole. I suggest that it is impossible in a highly organised industrial country like ours to proceed with a national scheme for the planning and reorganisation of British industry, as a whole, unless you start gradually, by dealing with individual industries and then work up to planning on a national scale. The difficulties which are found in this country in the way of proceeding rapidly with schemes of reorganisation are relics from the immediate post-War period. We are bound to admit that the construction of works in this country in the steel industry for instance, was carried on with very little planning during the later period of the War. That was due entirely to the special needs which the War Departments placed on the steel industry. Our problem therefore in the steel industry, and in other industries as well in this country is to wipe out redundant plant, and that will take a number of years to accomplish. Fresh finance is essential and until there was some element of certainty it was impossible to find industrial or financial leaders or anybody in this country, to come forward and help in reorganising and financing the industry afresh.
I wish to say definitely, and I ask the hon. Gentleman the Member for Lime-house to believe it, that the leaders of British industry, particularly those whom I know, are very conscious of the need for the reorganisation and planning of their own particular industries. I may mention that during the last few months, as a result of the introduction of the Import Duties Act, definite steps have
been taken in various parts of the country, with some confidence, to reorganise various industries and it is hoped that following upon this increase of confidence, new developments may be seen very shortly. I am in total agreement with the hon. Gentleman on a scheme of national planning but I disagree with his view that you can proceed with such a scheme, except on the basis of dealing with the individual industries and then building up to a national scale.
May I give an instance of what I have in mind 9 I started by saying that the problem of to-day was that of overproduction and under-consumption. I take, only as an instance, the case of the steel industry. The problem which we are up against in that industry is this: Europe has a surplus capacity of steel production. It is therefore essential that the steel industry of this country, having gained a certain amount of confidence as a result of the action of the present Government, should try to plan itself on a national basis. Having done so, it is entitled to go into conference with the steel-makers of Europe and to discuss with them an international cartel. It is in this way that I think the Government have given to the steel industry, in particular, some measure of confidence, because approaches have been made to the international steel cartel by the British steel industry during the last two or three years and it has been found impossible to come to agreement on the question of allocation of markets or allocation of countries because the Continental steel-producing countries would only start their calculations by taking into consideration the fact that they had the right to export freely to this country. The British steel makers found it impossible to discuss the question with the international producers on those terms. Now, having got the protection which the Import Duties Act has given the steel industry, we are in a stronger position to meet foreign producers, and to discuss with them the question of an international cartel and the international planning of markets generally. While, as I said at the outset, it is a pleasure to listen to the hon. Member for Limehouse, I doubt whether he is particularly serious about national planning, because, after explaining at some
length what his scheme was, he finished by telling the House that he had no confidence in the present economic system, so that he apparently does not think that the scheme is possible under that system. Hon. Members who sit below the Gangway, at any rate, believe that a change in the economic system is possible in our time, whereas the hon. Gentleman evidently totally disagrees with them, and believes that the heaven is not for our time.

Mr. ATTLEE: I said that we cannot change the system and make a better plan under capitalism.

Mr. JONES: I apologise to the hon. Gentleman; I misunderstood him. I am in agreement that national planning is essential, and that sooner or later we shall have to arrive at some scheme of national planning, because, whether it takes five years or 10 years, only by such a scheme will it be possible for us to enter into an international arrangement with other countries in their individual producing industries.

Mr. A. C. REED: As an industrialist who has had a long experience I think the Board of Trade is to be congratulated on the work of the last six or seven months. I am satisfied that the Committee can vote the Supply, feeling fully justified that the Board will make good use of the money. The change that has come over industry in that short period is really remarkable. Only last week I met a prominent Continental industrialist who was in this country nine months ago. Since then he has made a world tour, and he told me that the change that he noticed on his return to this country was simply remarkable, and, that although he was not a national of England, he felt that England was the country of the world once more. Such a testimony coming from an independent source is worth having, and I give a great deal of the credit for the change to the work of the Board of Trade. By its encouragement of industry under the. Abnormal Importations Act, the Import Duties Act, and the other measures taken to support industry, it has given renewed hope to every industry.
I am associated with the great paper industry which has both sides of the question before it. The Abnormal Import
Duties apply to one small section of the industry, but not to the other section. In the one small section, in the last six months, there have been the most extraordinary advances. There was one particular line which was hardly manufactured here at all, largely owing to the dumping of the foreigner. Now new machines have been started and others have been adapted, and in the five months the manufacturers in this country have produced sufficient supplies for the demand. In another two or three months they will fully cover the demand. It is to be noted that that has occurred with a duty which is only temporary. In the other departments of that industry where there was no protection until the 10 per cent. duty was recently imposed, there has been no advance, and the trade was more or less stagnant.
I was interested to hear the figures given by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade showing the increase in the numbers of employed and the increased consumption of coal in this country. This goes to prove that the Abnormal Import Duties have already given a fillip to trade. As those duties cover only a small section of industry, it gives tremendous hope for the future when further duties are imposed and the large industries are covered by duties to enable our manufacturers—

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN (Captain Bourne): I am afraid that the hon. Member must not go into the question of future duties because that involves legislation, which cannot be discussed in Committee of Supply.

Mr. BUCHANAN: On a point of Order. I understand. that the position was somewhat altered now that we have the Tariffs Advisory Committee, which can make recommendations for new tariffs. Is it not in order for hon. Members to argue, in view of the committee's powers, that they ought to recommend. certain tariffs.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: I think that the old Ruling still stands. The Import Duties Act requires a Resolution of this House to give effect to any recommendations of the committee far new duties. I would also point out that the expenses of the Advisory Committee are
borne on the Vote of the Treasury, and not on this Vote.

Mr. MAXTON: This is rather an important Ruling because, presumably, in the months that are ahead we shall have recommendations and reports from the Advisory Committee with reference to new tariffs and duties and modifications or adjustments in the amounts of existing tariffs and duties. Am I to understand that these are to be regarded as in the nature of legislative enactments, that the responsible Ministers of the Crown cannot be criticised with reference to them, and that every proposal for an alteration m tariffs and every reference to it here is to be treated as discussion of new legislation? I hope that that will not be the full implication of the Ruling which you have given, and I would like your further observations upon it.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: The hon. Member will realise that I did not anticipate this question. I agree that the appointment of the Advisory Committee does create rather a new situation and one of considerable difficulty from the point of view of order. I would rather not commit myself at this moment, without further consideration, to a, Ruling which might govern future Debates. I think I can rule, however, that we cannot discuss new duties until there is a report from the Advisory Committee before the House, and, generally speaking, we must keep to the old Rule that things that may involve legislation cannot be discussed in Committee of Supply. On the question as to whether the action of the Minister in receiving the report can be discussed in Committee of Supply, I would rather not give a Ruling without further consideration.

Sir S. CRIPPS: In the consideration that you will give to your Ruling, may I ask you to bear in mind that it is competent for the Minister to make an Order as to the duties to be chargeable, and that it is only subsequently that the House has an opportunity of saying whether the Order shall continue? The duty becomes operative without any control of the House, and simply on the Order made by the Minister. When you are considering the matter, perhaps you will take that point into consideration.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: While I do not wish to prejudge any Ruling that you,
Captain Bourne, may give in future, may I ask whether it is not the case that the Advisory Committee is not borne upon the Board of Trade Vote at all, but upon the Treasury Vote, and that therefore it is not until the Treasury Vote comes up that the point can arise in the form in which it has been put to the Committee to-day; moreover that the reports of the Advisory Committee are to be made, not to the Board of Trade, but to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and that they therefore cannot be regarded as a Board of Trade matter?

Mr. RHYS DAVIES: I would like to be clear on this point. I hope, Captain Bourne, that you will bear in mind one issue that may arise in this connection. During the past few years we have had arguments in our Debates in favour of tariffs and Free Trade. Now that duties have been imposed, would it be competent in a Debate like this to argue that they should be removed? I want to know how free we should be to argue in favour of the abolition of any duties in a Debate of this kind.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN: With regard to the point of the hon. Member for Westhoughton (Mr. Rhys Davies), I cannot, without studying the Acts, give a definite reply at this time, but I rather think that that would necessitate legislation, except in so far as certain Acts may lapse. With regard to the point raised by the Minister, I think it is quite clear that as the expenses of the Tariff Advisory Committee are borne on the Treasury Vote and as the report is made to the Treasury, the proper Vote on which to discuss any action or recommendation the Committee may make is that of the Treasury. I think that that is quite clear. With regard to the point raised by the hon. and learned Member for Bristol (Sir S. Cripps), I desire to give very careful consideration to this and to discuss it with the authorities of the House, because I realise that, owing to the legislation recently passed, the position is perhaps not quite the same as it has been in the past. Before the Chairman or I give a definite and binding Ruling, we should desire to consider it very carefully. We have no desire to curtail the rights of Members.

Mr. REED: I should like to make another point. A good deal has been
said about reorganisation, and especially Government reorganisation in industry. The history of the last few months has proved that our industrialists, if they are given the chance, can reorganise themselves. They want security; they want to know where they are, and when once they have security and can forecast the future for some years, they will proceed as rapidly over the coming years as they have done in the last six months. My experience is that our industrialists and workers are quite capable, under fair conditions, of competing with anyone in the world. Therefore, I ask the President of the Board of Trade to urge the Government to let us have the full Government programme of trade and industry at the earliest possible date. If they do, the industrialists of this country will not let them down.

6.30 p.m.

Mr. G. HALL: I will not follow the interesting speech of the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Reed), but will come at once to the statement which was made by the President of the Board of Trade. When the Government were formed, we thought that if there was one Department in the Government where we should have the strong man, the man of vision and of ability, it was the Board of Trade. The right hon. Gentleman has had considerable experience in this House, and has previously occupied the Department over which he now presides, but his statement this afternoon was one of the most disappointing statements to which I have listened from a President of the Board of Trade. I rather expected him to give us a world review of trade, and to take the House and the country into his confidence regarding the future prospects of trade. The only consolation he gave us was that while trade is bad in this country it is worse in almost every other industrial country. He pointed out that the decrease in production in this country is less than in all the other large industrial countries. He said the reduction here was about 11 per cent. last year—

Mr. RUNCIMAN: Reduction of exports.

Mr. HALL: —and that in America it was 14 per cent.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: On comparable figures it was about 35 per cent. in the United States.

Mr. HALL: The position is the same in regard to the actual production of various countries. This country withstood the blizzard of last year and the previous year very much better than most other industrial countries. The figures the right hon. Gentleman gave us are confirmed by the figures issued by the Labour Bureau of the League of Nations Union. I would point out to the right hon. Gentleman that this country, which was a Free Trade country, has changed its fiscal policy although it faced the industrial depression better than any other industrial country. The right hon. Gentleman himself, who until within the last few months was a Free Trader, is now, with his Government, following the very bad example of the other industrial countries. That is an indication that we shall not get from the Board of Trade, while it is under the control of the right hon. Gentleman, that lead in the reorganisation of industry which we expected.
From what the right hon. Gentleman said this afternoon, all that this country now has to depend upon is import duties. He gave no indication of any other Measure likely to improve either the inland trade or the export trade. His statement will be very cold comfort to industrialists and to those engaged in industry. I was very much interested in his juggling with the figures which he gave us, especially those dealing with the increased number employed now compared with September. I ask him to give the actual figures of persons who were in employment last September and who are in employment at the present time. I think he told us that somewhere about 450,000 additional persons were in employment. Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary will give the actual figures of the persons in employment—the number of insured persons, I think it will be called —in September last year and March this year. If he does so, he will find that in September last there were 9,328,000 persons in employment, and in March this year 9,549,000, an increase of 223,000. I am not suggesting that that is not an improvement, but it is not the very glowing picture which the right hon. Gentleman attempted to present. I am afraid that, with all his ability, his attempt to go into figures this afternoon has not been too successful.
He told us, further, that 390 foreign manufacturers contemplate setting up factories in this country. I would respectfully advise any Member of the present Cabinet to be very careful when making prophecies about work coming into this country from abroad. The present Secretary of State for the Dominions went to Canada just after the formation of the Labour Government in 1929. The Government had hardly been formed before he must go for a, tour, to find new business. We expected, from what he said, that we were going to send lots of coal to Canada and to build the ships which would convey it, and the hon. and gallant Member for Gainsborough (Captain Crookshank), who was then on this side of the House, continued to question the right hon. Gentleman as to when the ships would be built and the coal sent, and when the country would get all the new business we had been led to expect from his statements. From that day to this the ships have not been built.

Captain CROOKSHANK: The hon. Member will not forget that it was a statement made by a Minister of the Labour Administration.

Mr. HALL: The hon. and gallant Member and his colleagues were so satisfied with his work while with us that they were willing to take him into their arms, and he is now one of the shining lights of the party of which the hon. and gallant Member is also a shining light. I am reminded that the right hon. Gentleman is going to represent the hon. and gallant Member at Ottawa. He is going to talk the same humbug as when he dealt with Imperial questions at the last inter-Imperial Conference. The President of the Board of Trade also told us that production had begun in some 43 of the new and adapted factories taken by foreigners. I and my colleagues are very pleased to think that there are any new factories to give additional employment to our people—we do not want to minimise anything the right hon. Gentleman can do—but I should be very much interested to know where those factories have been established. Have they actually begun production?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: indicated assent.

Mr. HALL: How many are new? Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary will be able to inform us what new factories
have been established, where they have been established and the number of work-people employed.

Mr. MAXTON: They may be like the ships.

Mr. HALL: The right hon. Gentleman said that most of the new factories have been established in and around London, but that development associations have pointed out the advantages of certain of the distressed areas, and he mentioned Lancashire and the North-East Coast. I am sure he will not object if I ask him whether he or his Department will give a thought to some of the other distressed areas.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: indicated assent.

Mr. HALL: I come from a district which has suffered from industrial depression over a longer continuous period and in a more aggravated form than almost any other area, and I ask the right hon. Gentleman to give some thought to South Wales, to Scotland, and some of the other districts which are suffering so grievously. We were very much interested, also, in what he said about the restrictions on our export trade in coal, but I think he treated the subject too lightly. I wondered whether he fully realises the effect of those restricted measures. I agree very largely with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton (Mr. D. Graham) that it is not easy to interfere with countries such as Germany, France and Belgium which at present have large stocks of coal on hand and are only following the example of the right hon. Gentleman and his Government in imposing these restrictive measures. Whatever the right hon. Gentleman may say about these restrictions having been imposed prior to the Abnormal Importations Act or the Import Duties Act, I would point out that for some three months Europe knew what was going to happen. The fact of our going off the Gold Standard gave this country a great advantage in its export trade, and when we had statements from responsible Ministers indicating that legislation dealing with abnormal importations and import duties was waiting to be introduced, of course European countries felt they ought to get in the first blow.
Bad as the condition of the coal industry is in this country, we certainly are in a much more favourable position than a large number of the other coal-producing countries; but that is not saying much, because I realise how difficult-it is to continue the coal industry as it is in this country at the present time. But, taking a view of all the large coal-producing countries—the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Belgium and the Saar—I find that their output of coal last year was 852,000,000 tons, as compared with 989,000,000 tons in the previous year, a reduction of 137,000,000 tons. Those-figures, I am reminded, exclude Russia. Comparing the output of last year with the output in 1929 in the same countries, there is a reduction of nearly 250,000,000 tons. I think that this indicates a substantial falling off in the use of coal. I do not agree with the statement made by the right hon. Gentleman that as far as the inland coal trade is concerned everything is going on very well. That trade shows a reduction of 230,000,000 tons in the output of coal in the countries which I have mentioned. Coal mining is still an important industry in this country, notwithstanding the reduction in the number employed in that trade. I did mean to correct the figure given by the President of the Board of Trade, and I think he will be inclined to agree with me that the figure which I gave was substantially correct.

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I was speaking from memory, and I was suggesting that the very big drop in the export trade had been compensated for in other ways. The Parliamentary Secretary will give the figures later on.

Mr. HALL: I was quoting from the Board of Trade Journal. The hon. Member for Hamilton gave figures showing that from 1931 to March of this year there has been a reduction of nearly 50,000 in the number of men employed in the mining industry. Notwithstanding that fact, there are 835,000 people still employed in the production of coal for home consumption and the export markets. Besides this, the reduction in the number of men employed is followed by a marked reduction in the output, although the reduction in output is not nearly as marked as it is in the number of men employed. There has been considerable
speeding up, and the figures which may be obtained from the Mines Department and the Board of Trade will indicate that as between 1926 and the commencement of this year there has been an increase in the number of unemployed. The output of 1931 compared with the average from 1921 to the end of 1925 shows an actual reduction of something like 37,000,000 tons, the reduction being from 260,000,000 tons to 223,000,000 tons. In output and in the number of miners employed the coal industry of this country has really gone back to where it was some 30 or 35 years ago. Coal is still the lifeblood of industry in this country. I am not going to deal with the question of internal consumption, and I know that I shall be out of order if I attempted to deal with administration. We want to take another opportunity of dealing with the Mines Department administration and the wider question when the Mines Department Vote is put down for consideration.
To-day I will deal with the question of the effect of these restrictions upon our export trade. No industry in this country has made a greater contribution to the trade balance or the balance of payments than the coal mining industry. For nearly half a century we have been making, through our export trade, a very large contribution to the balance of payments. In 1913 the export of coal, including bunkers, was round about 100,000,000 tons. Almost one-third of the output of the coal of this country is exported. In 1929, we exported 60,266,000 tons. That total does not include 16,000,000 tons used for bunker purposes. It means that 76,000,000 tons of coal left the shores of this country in 1929. There has been a considerable reduction in our export trade. In 1930 there was a reduction to 70,000,000 tons, and in 1931 there was a, further reduction to 57,000,000 tons. That is 13,000,000 tons less than in 1930 and 20,000,000 tons less than in 1929.
One cannot measure this altogether with regard to the volume of trade. We must take into account the revenue derived from the export of coal. In 1929 we Obtained nearly £49,000,000 for coal exported, not including bunker coal. In 1930 the amount was £45,000,000, and in 1931 the amount was reduced to
£34,500,000. The unfortunate part of it is that the export of coal from this country during the first three months of this year, notwithstanding the reduction of last year, again shows a reduction. It is upon that aspect of the question that I want to take up some little additional time of the Committee. As I have already pointed out, one-fourth of the coal output is sold for export and bunker purposes, and 200,000 miners and their families are dependent upon the export trade. The export trade affects South Wales more than any other coalfield in the country with the exception of Northumberland. Last year, of the output of 38,000,000 tons of coal from South Wales 18,000,000 tons were exported, and more than half of the mining population in South Wales are directly dependent upon the export trade.
Already the loss of trade has had a very serious effect upon the mining population of that part of the country. The hon. Member for Hamilton gave figures which are substantially correct, but I was very much interested in a statement made by Professor Marquand, Professor of Industrial Relations at Cardiff University College. He said that from 1901 to 1911, 92,000 persons had migrated into Glamorganshire, 'whereas during the years 1921 to 1931 the four counties of Glamorgan, Monmouth, Brecon and Carmarthen had lost by migration 249,000 persons, very largely as a result of the depression in the export trade.

Mr. DAVID MASON: Will the hon. Member give the figures of the reduction for the first three months of this year?

Mr. HALL: I will give them to my hon. Friend later on. What we are concerned about is the attitude of the Board of Trade with regard to the question of interference with our export trade. A question was put on Tuesday to the President of the Board of Trade, and in his reply the right hon. Gentleman gave the names of a number of countries which are adopting discriminatory measures against the importation of British coal. The right hon. Gentleman said, in reply to the question:
Quota restrictions on the importation of coal are in force in Germany, France and Belgium. As I have already informed the House, the recent successive reductions of
the quota of British coal imported into Germany are regarded as discriminatory against this country. The French and Belgian quota restrictions apply to coal imported from all countries, but the method of calculation of the quotas and the administration of the licensing systems which give effect to the quotas are considered to be inequitable to this country. In Italy the general landing duty of 2½ lire per ton applies only to goods imported by sea, and accordingly affects coal from this country to a greater extent than coal from other countries.—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th April, 1932; col. 645, Vol 264.]
Take German discrimination. The right hon. Gentleman knows that if these restrictions continue, the export of coal from this country to Germany will be reduced by something like one-fourth. We saw the effects of these restrictions in the first three months of 1930, when 1,185,000 tons of coal were exported to Germany. In the first three months of 1931 we exported 873,000 tons of coal to Germany, while in the first three months of this year the export to Germany was 777,000 tons. As I have already pointed out, the average was 400,000 tons per month, and that has now been reduced by something like 100,000 tons per month. We complain that those restrictions are only imposed against this country, and I under-stand that there is no restriction on coal imported into Germany from any other country.
7.0 p.m.
The President of the Board of Trade has said that other countries are suffering restrictions on their export trade to the same extent as we are suffering. It is nearly three months since those restrictions of which we complain were put into operation. They have now developed in an acute form, and little or nothing has been done by the Government in regard to them. Notwithstanding that, those restrictions amount to a flat repudiation of the obligations which Germany undertook in relation to the importation of British coal in connection with the Anglo-German Commercial Agreement. We realise that this is a difficult question, because we are informed that the situation on the Ruhr is deplorable, and the number of miners employed has been reduced by 20,000 during the last two or three months in the Ruhr where they have over 10,000,000 tons of coal stocked, notwithstanding that several hundred thousand tons of coal have been giver to
the unemployed in that district. Had it been anyone other than the right hon. Gentleman occupying the position which he occupies, or had he been sitting in some other part of the House and someone else occupied the position of President of the Board of Trade, I have no doubt that he would be one of the first to press for these restrictions to be removed. As far as we have been able to ascertain, negotiations are going on in the ordinary way very smoothly and there is very little or no prospect at all of anything being done in the very near future.
The right hon. Gentleman casually referred to the restrictions in France and endeavoured to take some credit to himself and his Department for the removal of the surtax of 15 per cent. which the French Government put on. I certainly do not want to take from him and the Secretary for Mines and his Department any of the credit they deserve for assisting, but I think it was the deputation of the Mining Association which visited Paris which had a considerable amount to do with the removal of the surtax and also some other measures which have been undertaken by some of the coal-owners in South Wales. While it is true to say that the surtax has been removed, it is also true that the amount of coal imported into France from this country and from most other countries is to be restricted to 62 per cent. of the monthly quota average spread over the last three years. Owing to France not yet being able to tighten up the administration of her licensing restrictions, in January this year the imports of coal from this country into France were 92,000 metric tons less than the quantity allocated under the 72 per cent. restriction then in operation. As far as Germany was concerned, France allowed the Germans to increase their quota by something like 82,000 tons for the same period. Belgium increased her quota by 71,000 tons, Holland by 45,000 tons, and Poland by 29,000 tons. Again in February, when the 62 per cent. quota came into operation, the United Kingdom was the only country whose share of the import coal trade was less than that allotted under the licensing system. Germany was actually 8,000 tons more than the monthly average in the three years 1928, 1929, 1930.
France has already had to face two consequences of the licensing experiment —a considerable curtailment of pit-wood imports into Great Britain and lower earnings of shipping engaged in the cross channel trade. South Wales has been affected as the result of these restrictions because South Wales sends 53 per cent. of the coal exported from this country into France and the South Wales pit-wood importers are retaliating. I find, comparing March of this year with March last year, that in March, 1931, 63,965 mills of pit-wood were imported from France into South Wales but in March, 1932, that number had been reduced to 25,000 loads of pit-wood. At the same time there was an increase in the import of pit-wood from Portugal from 10,000 loads in March, 1931, to 46,000 loads in March, 1932. The result is that the French pit-wood exporters are themselves trying to find out some ways and means of dealing with this restriction. That gives very little credit to the President of the Board of Trade and his Department for doing anything regarding this question.
Take the case of Belgium; there is a restriction against the import of coal from this country by Belgium. While we cannot complain so much about the percentage or quota allowed to this and other coal exporting countries, the restrictions of Belgium have affected this country more than any other country owing to the year upon which the quota is based. In 1930 we exported from this country to Belgium 1,097,000 tons of coal, but the quota is not based upon that figure. In 1931 we exported from this country 657,000 tons of coal, and our difficulty is that the quota fixed by Belgium is based upon the imports of coal into that country last year. Belgium received a very large amount of coal from other countries, which was very largely to the detriment of the export coal trade of this country. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to note that aspect of this matter and to see if something cannot be done in that direction. Not only is there the question of the quota, but there is the question of price. Although we cannot complain as to the prices paid for coal by the Belgian railways, yet it gives an idea of the price at which coal is being sold by this country to foreign countries. The Belgian railways have decided to take 665,000 tons of small coal, 85,000 of
briquettes, and 45,000 tons of screened coal from the Belgian collieries at prices ranging from 100 to 110 francs. A large percentage of this order used to go to this country. They are now this year taking 60,000 tons of British coal, and, while they are paying 100 to 110 francs to Belgian collieries, the price quoted for Northumberland smalls was as low as 64 francs, or nearly 50 per cent. of the cost of the coal which the Belgian railways are taking from the Belgian collieries. One cannot interfere with the question of price, but it indicates the price at which coal is sold from this country at the present time.
It is not only a question of restriction, but of the artificial methods adopted by some of these countries to compete in the export coal markets with this country. A similar plan is in operation for the supply of coal for the railways in Poland as there is in Belgium. From what I understand the Polish coal industry is in such a bad way that the Government of Poland have had to come in and have virtually nationalised the industry there. The right hon. Gentleman wanted some examples of the success of nationalisation at times other than war time. We can give him a large number of examples of industries that have had to be taken over by the State from private individuals because they are unable to handle those industries, and this is one of those examples. Let us see how Poland regards the value of her coal industry. The importance of the export of coal in the balance of trade or of payments is regarded as of the utmost importance by the Polish Government. Last year they exported something like one-third of their output and the total value of their export trade was about £7,500,000. They made no end of sacrifices to obtain that export trade. We find that the price charged for coal free on board at the ports was 10s. a ton. After allowing for railway freights, dock dues, and other charges, the actual amount received by the Polish coalowners at the pithead for the coal which they exported would not amount to more than 5s. a ton and, taking into account the disadvantage they were placed in owing to our going off the Gold Standard, it is estimated that the actual value of the coal exported from Poland to those who produced the coal at the pithead would not have amounted to more
than 4s. a ton. There was not only a very heavy subsidy from the pithead to the port but a very heavy restrictive duty against the importation of any coal into Poland.
Next I want to deal with the question of Italy. The right hon. Gentleman did not touch the Italian question this afternoon. I should have thought that out of consideration for his predecessor in office some little attention would have been given to the export of coal from this country to Italy. One of the first actions of my right hon. Friend, my late lamented friend, who was the friend of everyone in this House, the late Mr. Graham, when he accepted the post of the President of the Board of Trade, was to go to the Hague with the late Chancellor of the Exchequer. He came back from the Hague, notwithstanding all the difficulties of reparation coal, with a firm agreement with the Italian railways to take 1,000,000 tons of coal from this country for the three years 1930, 1931, 1932. That agreement will expire at the end of this year. Is the right hon. Gentleman or his Department doing anything to get an extension of that agreement I know there are difficulties. All the coal which was directed to be supplied during last year was not supplied owing to the industrial depression and financial difficulties. South Wales is very concerned about this question of carrying out the agreement and, if possible, would like an extension of the agreement, because 75 per cent. of this order for 1,000,000 tons of coal was placed in South Wales. Considerable concern has been evinced by exporters and coalowners in South Wales about this question. I know, as was mentioned in reply to a question on Tuesday, that there is a general duty on goods imported into Italy of 21 lire. Is there any coal-producing country in the world sending seaborne coal into Italy? No other coal producing country in the world is doing so. Therefore, the duty of 2½ lire which is charged by the Italian authorities is aimed entirely against this country, and that is another aspect of this question that I would like the President of the Board of Trade to take up.
As has been pointed out already, the export coal market is a restricted market; there is a scramble for it. We are in the market, Poland is in the
market, Germany is in the market, America is in the market; and, while all these countries are in the market for a restricted trade, there will be these difficulties which are restricting the free flow of goods from one country to another. When the Coal Mines Act was passed in 1930, it was felt that it would be the means of organising the coal industry of this country into a national organisation. That was its primary aim, but it also aimed at getting some European agreement with regard to the export of coal. Are the right hon. Gentlemen and his Department going to allow the present chaotic condition to continue? Are he and his Parliamentary Secretary so concerned with regard to abnormal importations and import duties that they are not going to give the attention that they ought to give to this very important question?
No nation has all the trade advantages or all the capable business men, and no nation can do all the business that is to be done. The fostering of industries by means of tariffs, bounties or quotas invariably results in injuriously affecting the trade of all countries. A bounty on export coal carries Polish coal into markets that naturally would be supplied by other countries. When we went off the Gold Standard, it was thought that that would give a definite stimulus to the export trade of this country, and particularly to the export trade in coal. But, almost at the same time that we went off the Gold Standard, 14 countries increased their tariffs or imposed restrictive measures against this country. France put on the surtax which has been referred to, and other countries put on other restrictions.
I should have liked to follow up the statement of the right hon. Gentleman with regard to the inland consumption of coal, but I am afraid I shall have to keep that question for another occasion. I would, however, like to draw his attention to the fact that, owing to the more scientific use of coal in this country for the generation of electricity, in iron and steel production, and in gas production, the inland market for coal is gradually dwindling. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman's Department to deal with a question in which I know he is interested. I have heard him speak of the inroads which oil has made into the coal produc-
tion of this country. Unless the Department or the Government give their attention to the scientific treatment of coal, and the question of oil extraction from coal, the outlook for coal in this country is not too promising. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman and his Department not to run away with the idea that, because they have taxed tomatoes or asparagus, or have put on a 10 per cent. duty which is to be a revenue duty, all is going to be well with industry in this country. That device has been tried in almost every other industrial country in the world, and it has failed.
The right hon. Gentleman is at the head of a Department which can do what I am suggesting, and I would ask him to pay greater attention to re-organisation and development, and not to think so much about matters like quotas on wheat. If we could have £6,000,000 a year for the re-organisation of the coal industry and the scientific treatment of coal in this country, or if we could have the amount spent on the Sugar Beet Subsidy, or the proceeds of de-rating, in 10 years the power-producing industries of this country would be completely revolutionised. These sums, however, have been frittered away here and there, while we know that there are projects, the products of scientific minds in this country, that could make this country absolutely independent of oil importation if that money could have been applied to them. I ask the right hon. Gentleman and his Department to pay greater attention to that aspect of the question, and not to rest satisfied that all is well as the result of the little that has been done in regard to tariffs and quotas.

Mr. GODFREY NICHOLSON: I need the sympathy of the House in making my maiden speech, and perhaps the best indulgence that I can ask for is that no one will count the House out while I am addressing "the great open spaces." I am afraid I shall cover, to certain extent, the ground that has been covered by the last speaker, but I shall, perhaps, approach the question from a different angle. If I may make a personal remark, I feel a double responsibility in speaking on the subject of coal. In the first place, I feel the responsibility that attaches to every National Member who won a mining seat. A great trust was placed in us. Most of us turned out old
and trusted leaders in the mining movement, and I know that I speak for those who are in the same position as myself when I say that we are determined to give the miners as good or better leadership than they had before. In the second place, I have a particular personal responsibility, as I sit for the Morpeth Division, which has always returned men of great prominence in the mining movement, from the days of the great Thomas Burt to the days of my immediate predecessor, whom, I am sure, we all welcome in his present position of secretary of the Miners' Federation.
I feel considerable embarrassment and responsibility, therefore, particularly in view of the fact—I hope I shall not be out of order in referring to it—that the House meets to-day under the shadow of a great potential crisis in the mining industry. I am not at all happy about the position. I am thankful, however, that to-night I shall deal with a more clear-cut issue. I may say, in passing, that I await very anxiously the declaration of His Majesty's Government as to policy: or, if they do not feel inclined to make a declaration of policy in these days, I would beg of them, at any rate, to assure a certain body of people that they will not have matters all their own way. I cannot say any more than that.
I do not take up the same attitude as the hon. Member for Aberdare (Mr. G. Hall). I think he paid far too much attention to the political aspect of trade, commerce, economics, and the export coal trade in general. In referring to Poland, Germany and France, he seemed to have forgotten that in all Continental countries economics is the handmaid of politics, while in this country, and in this country alone, politics is the handmaid of economics, and I am thankful that that is so. I am firmly persuaded that economics will beat politics, and that our claim for due attention to economics as a form of realism will bring us through again now, as in the past, and enable us to win the race. Poland is practically bankrupt, and Poland has to support the Silesian mines for purely political reasons, because of the great German population and the German frontier that runs through them. In Germany, the restrictions on imports are purely for the purpose of obtaining enough foreign exchange. The great imports of Polish coal
into France are of purely political origin. Still, these matters are not what I am here to talk about to-night; I am here both to criticise and to support the Government and the right hon. Gentleman in their and his attitude towards the restrictions and the discriminatory action of Germany, France and Belgium against British coal.
I should like to mention what those restrictions are, and why we object to them very strongly. The House will have noticed that in Germany the restriction was imposed on the 1st October, 1931. Of course, I quite agree that the German Government knew clearly what the result of the General Election would be; but, seriously, I would ask the Labour party to abandon its childish and puerile attitude of making political capital out of imaginary motives alleged to lie behind the attitude of various foreign States. Ever since 1923, imports into Germany have been under licence. The system was worked perfectly fairly until October last. In that month, our quota was reduced from 420,000 tons per month to 300,000 tons, and subsequent reductions on the 1st February, the 1st March, and the 1st April of this year, were to 200,000, 150,000 and 100,000 tons respectively. This last figure, I submit, is absolutely ridiculous. We object to it because it is not applied in the same degree to other countries, and because it is contrary to Article 8 of the Treaty of 1924.
Turning to France, their action is clearly not an example of retaliatory action, although the French are very prophetic. It was imposed on the 1st August. The President of the Board of Trade referred to the surtax, but, personally, I do not attach much importance to the surtax, because it was always paid by the importer, and I do not; believe that it affected the imports of English coal into France in the slightest degree, or, at any rate, in any very great degree. What I object to is the quota, which was based on the average of the years 1928, 1929 and 1930, of which our proportion is 64 per cent. I do not blame the French Government for imposing that quota. I think that in this case, as, indeed, in regard to French fiscal and economic policy for some years past, we have been most unjust to
the French Government. I believe that we can learn a great deal from the fiscal policy of France. What I protest against is the fact that the quota has been manipulated in a very unfair way by other countries. In fact, I see that during the five months from August to December last, Germany, Holland and Belgium have exceeded it by 21 per cent., while we have exceeded it by 51- per cent.
Turning to Belgium, which is the worst case of all—it is a very bad case, and represents treatment such as we did not expect from Belgium—we find that Germany and Holland are flooding the market with their own coal, while our exports to Belgium have fallen by from 15 to 20 per cent. per annum over the last three years. While these two countries have flooded the Belgian market, they have imposed a quota system which applies equally to us. That is the first unfairness. It was imposed first in 1930, when our quota was 76 per cent., but when it was found that the countries against which that restriction was direced, excluding our own country, exceeded that quota, it was altered to 70 per cent. of the 1931 figure, when our exports were already suffering.
7.30 p.m.
These are the cases against which the Government of this country ought to protest, and I am not at all satisfied about their action. I am sorry in my maiden speech to criticise the Government, but, frankly, I do not understand their attitude. I can quite understand the foreign point of view. I am persuaded that the world has gone mad; every country in the world is trying to sell and not to buy. It is madness, and we know it. I perfectly understand why the foreigner attacks us first and says, "Let England bear the brunt." It is because of the spineless attitude that we have long pursued throughout an epoch which is now, happily, only a question of history. I am not blaming the foreigner, and I am the last person to wish that the foreign miner should be unemployed, but I must consider my own constituents first. I quite understand the Government attitude of protest as far as it has gone. I believe there have been plenty of protests and threats of retaliatory action but, as to acts of retaliation, I have yet to hear of them. Have there been any negotiations
begun with a view to reciprocal trade agreements? Reciprocal trade agreements take a very long time to arrange and to get down to, but I am convinced that, without any regard to Ottawa, it would be wisdom to begin considering reciprocal trade agreements, because anyhow they will not be implemented for another year. I think we could learn a great deal from our Continental neighbours in this way. They have had very long experience of these matters. Even what has been done has not been done strongly enough because, so far, I have failed to see any result of their action.
I want to know whether the German Ambassador realises the rising tide of profound feeling that exists in this country, and whether it has been made clear to him that Anglo-German relations will be seriously prejudiced if this policy of pinpricks—it is only a pinprick but a very offensive one—is persisted in. Does France realise that we are no longer a complaisant neighbour? Does she realise that we are willing to enter into negotiations, that we are not looking solely towards the Empire, that we do, after all, pay attention to the most elementary facts of geography, which tell us that we are a European country. I am an Imperialist but I still believe England is a European country and that it is with our nearest neighbours that we shall do the most trade. Do the Belgian people take into account our resentment at this treatment?
I am not in favour of whining to these foreign nations, nor of threatening, but I am in favour of taking up the perfectly reasonable and firm attitude that we are not prepared to go on with this situation. I am not a narrow nationalist. I am a Free Trader fundamentally, and I hope this country will initiate a new spirit in European fiscal affairs. We are armed with our new fiscal policy, but I demand that this Government shall realise that this is a matter of urgency, shall realise that negotiations take a very long time and that foreigners are very slow in realising that the English attitude has changed completely. The natural markets for our coal are, after all, Scandinavia, including the Baltic States—not that there is very much market there, but it is worth having—Northern Germany, to a certain extent Belgium, Northern France from Rouen
westward, and Western France, and those markets are dwindling away. Every year, bit by bit, they get frittered away because of the action of foreign Governments.
I beg the Government to make a declaration of their policy, that they are not just going to be content to protest and then shrug their shoulders, or even threaten retaliatory measures, or even indulge in them, because in the end I cannot bring myself to believe that restriction of trade is likely to lead to an increase of trade. I ask them to initiate this policy of negotiation for reciprocal trade agreements. Not that I think that is the solution. I look for a true solution in international marketing schemes, and international schemes for limitation of output and reduction of hours. I think Mr. Shinwell's policy was right. It is at Geneva, with the aid of British owners and the British Government, that we shall find a way out of the present appalling position of the coal industries of Europe. You cannot do it by hard work and struggling. I beg the Government to take firm action and to impress upon foreign Powers that England has changed her attitude completely.

Mr. CROSSLEY: I am sure the whole House will want me to congratulate the hon. Member on his most admirable maiden speech, and I am sure everyone will want to hear him very often in our Debates. I say so with the more pleasure because I hold some of the same advanced views that he holds. He comes from a depressed area. I also come from a depressed area, though perhaps in Oldham we are a little more fortunate than he is, because at least we have big brick buildings, with vast floor spaces, suitable for new industries to settle in, and we have to-day—and we welcome it—a pronouncement by the President of the Board of Trade that the Government are going to try to guide the new industries that are coming into the country to settle in the areas that are most depressed. a is a little ironical that in my own particular district the next town to mine is Mossley, whose Member is so consistent in his upholding of the principles of Free Trade, and, if I read my morning paper aright to-day, a foreign industry has just come to that town and is going to absorb
no fewer than 1,400 of the unemployed of Mossley.
But I got up to speak on cotton, and especially on cotton organisation. We have our markets almost entirely abroad, and it would be true to say that we must estimate those markets and go out for the trade which we can hope to gather to our mills in Lancashire. We are at the moment working under certain temporary advantages. We have what is definitely an advantage to the cotton trade—the Japanese-Chinese dispute. Then we have certain monetary advantages which we did not have some time ago and which have been responsible for an enormous temporary increase in employment. We are looking forward to further advantages from Ottawa. We are looking forward to expanding our markets within the Empire. I think we look forward to that with good reason, and I hope very much that the President of the- Board of Trade will, with the other advisers to the Ottawa Conference, have a representative of the cotton industry continually advising, not only at Ottawa but previously to Ottawa, on the actual needs of the industry.
Is the industry itself in a fit condition to maintain the temporary advantages that we have to-day, and to increase those advantages that we hope to get at Ottawa? Its organisation is antiquated. The raw cotton comes to Liverpool. It goes in a lorry to a warehouse. It goes in another lorry to a spinning mill. It Is then spun and the yarn goes off to another part of Lancashire to be woven. It then goes to a bleacher or printer or dyer. It then goes to a merchant. It then goes to a packer and to a shipper and is finally sold by an agent who has nothing whatever to do with the people who actually made the cloth. It is not so in Japan. There the people who import the raw cotton send it to the spinning mill. It is spun and woven close at hand, and the very people who import the raw cotton export the finished cotton piece goods. It is not so in India, where all the processes of cotton manufacture are carried out in one comparatively small area. In Lancashire we suffer under that disability.
We have also this disability. We have a frame of mind towards all these questions which is out of date. It was per-
fectly up to date before the War, when trade was continually expanding, but now our trade is declining, and I should like to put it up as a proposition to the President of the Board of Trade that, while in an expanding market wholesale competition is a good thing, in a declining market it can have very evil effects indeed. It would be far better if that industry would estimate its markets and reduce its output to the estimate which it has formed. If it could say, "We need 35,000,000 spindles, we need so many looms," and if it could above all things say "We do not need our merchants at all, we will join in big combines," the weavers would join in big combines who would be their own agents, who would sell their own cloth, who would provide them with particulars of the market in which they were hoping to sell those goods. Otherwise, I can see no great hope for the cotton industry.
There is at present a scheme for a limitation of some of the plant of some of the sections of the industry and, so far as it goes, it is, I think, a good scheme. I hope it will have the full support of the Government, who have apparently, according to an answer to a question the other day, admitted the principle that, where an industry so desires, they will step in and force the recalcitrant minority in that industry to comply with the wishes of the majority. I for one welcome that admission. I am glad, especially in the days of our declining industry, that the Government have taken those steps, because no Government can view without grave concern the continued deterioration and loss of trade in what is still the greatest exporting industry.

Mr. C. BROWN: I too want to congratulate the hon. Member for Morpeth (Mr. G. Nicholson) on his maiden speech, because I realise that he struck a note which is seldom struck by supporters of the National Government. I feel that the continued reactionary policy of the Government that the hon. Member now supports, and the irresistible logic of events, will finally drive him into the ranks of the Labour party. I am very glad also that the hon. Member has familiarised himself with the industry of the constituency that he represents. I am certain that any future contributions that the hon. Member cares to make regarding
the coal industry will be listened to with very great interest by all of us. The constituency that I represent is interested in coal and in hosiery. I would not have taken part in this Debate at all if it had not been for some of the remarks made by the President of the Board of Trade in his opening speech. Naturally, coming to the House after these have been in operation for some time the Measures for which he is responsible, the right hon. Gentleman went to the Box with a great deal of pleasure, to demonstrate how up to this point his scheme had apparently been successful. I quite understand the pleasure that the right hon. Gentleman would take in being able to make that announcement to the House.
The right hon. Gentleman was pleased to inform us also of a number of factories that are being established by foreign firms in this country. If I did not misunderstand him the right hon. Gentleman sought to convey to the House the idea that amongst the foreign firms were one or more firms interested in the production of fine grade silk hosiery. He informed us that, generally speaking, hosiery can be broadly classified into the two categories of full fashioned hosiery and what is known as seamless hosiery. The right hon. Gentleman has been hopelessly misinformed by someone if he was led to convey the impression that a foreign firm exploiting an English invention known as the cotton patent hosiery machine is establishing for the first time in this country factories in which this patent machine is to be operated to make full fashioned hosiery. The cotton patent machine has been in operation in this country for quite a long time. I myself operated one 25 years ago, and full fashioned hosiery has been made in this country ever since the establishment of the hosiery industry in this country.
In regard to the fine grade hosiery machines, since the silk duties of 1924 or 1925 there has been—hon. Members opposite can take all the credit they like —a considerable boom in artificial silks and silk hosiery made on fine gauge, full fashioned, hosiery machines. What has always amazed me during these years has been this: Our own English hosiery manufacturers, who have been during the whole of that period agitating for tariffs on foreign hosiery imported into this country, have been filling their factories
with these machines from Germany during the whole of the intervening years. I was not surprised, but during the "Buy British" campaign a short time ago I observed one of the hosiery establishments in London—I do not want to mention the firm, because they pay good wages to their employés, who work under exceptionally good conditions—in whose windows there was the slogan "Buy British." When I looked into the windows I knew quite well that every stitch of the hosiery exhibited for sale was made on machines which had been imported into this country from Germany.
It seems to me strangely inconsistent on the part of these people to talk in the way that they do. This type of machinery is built in this country. As I observed to the right hon. Gentleman this afternoon, Messrs. Cotton, of Loughborough, the firm with whom the patent is associated, build this fine gauge hosiery machine, and so do Messrs. Blackburn, of Nottingham. They go up -to the same fine gauges as the German machines—44 gauge, or perhaps finer gauges than that. There is, however, something happening to which I wish to call attention. Foreign firms are coming here to put up factories and to instal this type of machinery. The President of the Board of Trade, in the days when he was a passionate advocate of Free Trade, would no doubt tell this House about the lower standard of life on the Continent contrasted with the standard of life of the workers in this country. The foreign firms who are building these factories in this country are attempting at the same time to introduce the methods of production that are now operative in Germany. Those are vastly different methods from the methods current in the hosiery trade here. Only on Tuesday night a hosiery manufacturer told me that he would probably have to bring about drastic changes in his factory in order successfully to compete with some of these new foreign firms. I am inclined to think that some of those who now bless the right hon. Gentleman for what he has done, will live to curse him if, through the operation of these firms, the standards of life of certain operatives in this country are reduced because of the new methods of production introduced by some of these foreign firms.
The right hon. Gentleman told the House that some of these machines cost from 1,500 to £2,000 each. They have been operated in this country so far by two skilled men, one on each shift, with two shifts in the 24 hours, or in some cases three shifts. The Continental method is different. It is to have only a semi-skilled individual on the machines, and a skilled mechanic looking after a number of them, with the consequent payment to the individual operative of far lower wages than have been paid to our operatives under the system in vogue here. So it may not all be as good as the right hon. Gentleman imagines in these initial stages. We shall not only get foreign factories, but foreign methods of production. I noticed also that the right hon. Gentleman had something to say about invention. He was careful to tell the House, as on a former occasion, that he attaches a great deal of importance to invention, having regard to the future prosperity of this country. Surely he understands that inventions, though in the long run they may have very beneficial effects, may temporarily have very disturbing effects indeed. If I had time I would have no difficulty in showing how the invention of the internal combustion engine has worked serious havoc in some industries in this country —in the coal industry and others. In the long run inventions may have advantages, but temporarily they may turn whole districts derelict. Do not let us forget that.
But there is a glimmering of truth and understanding in the right hon. Gentleman's mind. Once he was prepared to let prosperity depend upon Free Trade —"Let trade be as free as ever we can make it. As the channels of trade are free prosperity will come to us." Now he pins his faith on the clash of rival protectionist systems, one of which he himself is seeking to establish in this country. I am astonished at the lengths to which he has gone. Lord Beaverbrook can now count him as one of his disciples. The right hon. Gentleman stands at the Box and subscribes to the doctrine of Empire economic unity. Ah, but he did it with reservations. The reservations were that he saw beyond the Empire to the larger world. He talked about still retaining our foreign customers. Yes, I imagine that in the
future he will watch his ships sailing across the Seven Seas, and so long as he watches those ships I hope he will never become hide-bound to the doctrine of Empire economic unity. No. He will in the long run learn that the policy that he is now pursuing will not bring about the results that he has in mind. "Leave it to Free Trade," he said in days gone by. To-day he is for rival protectionist systems clashing with one another. He is wrong.
The hon. Member who has just resumed his seat represents one of the cotton constituencies of Lancashire. He also has an inkling of the truth. The State of the future, in which we are to have prosperity, will be a planned State, a State the whole of whose industries are carefully planned and carefully considered. At the moment we have only one example in the world of a planned State. We may not agree with its methods, but the planning is there, and sooner or later, because of the planning, we shall have to take note of it, and the hon. Gentleman and others who now support the National Government will be driven by the remorseless logic of economic events to the planned State.

8.0 p.m.

Captain HAROLD BALFOUR: The speech of the hon. Member for Mansfield (Mr. C. Brown), to which we have just listened, was one with which I think a good many of us on this side were in agreement even if, like the curate's egg, only in parts. It is the first speech which I have heard from the Opposition that has not contained one definite contradiction, a contradiction which was exemplified in the speech of the hon. Member for the Hamilton Division (Mr. D. Graham), who condemned whole-heartedly, in common with every Member who has spoken on that side, the fact that the Estimates which we are now discussing are the Estimates of a country which has changed its fiscal policy, but all the time those who were devoting themselves to the forwarding of the interests of the great industries in which they have served all their lives were themselves arguing for national fiscal protection within our country for their particular industry. The remarks of the hon. Member for Hamilton on the coal industry, which he knows by long experience, were to the effect that protection for the
country is bad, but that protection for the coal industry against the menace of oil and of new inventions is eminently desirable in the interests of his particular constituency.
It seems to me that we bad much better cease, in this House, arguing as to Protection and Free Trade. All that is finished. Let us say "Good-bye" to all that. Now we have an opportunity of seeing whether we in our political creeds are right and the hon. Members above the Gangway wrong, or whether they are right and we are wrong. I do not think we should be supporting the President of the Board of Trade or that he would be putting forward his views to-day, if we did not think, with a sincerity equal to that of the hon. Members composing the Opposition, that we are on the winning side. They think they are. Let us stop arguing about- it, and leave it to the practical test, which is really the only thing that counts in the end.
The question, whether we are under Free Trade or Protection, is bound up also with the question of national planning and the organisation of industry. The last speaker said that there was one country in the world which had planned nationally, and I rather think he wished us to plan along those lines. He is in a minority there, I think, but in common with him, we all wish to plan. I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade if it is the policy of the Government to try to plan nationally, through individual industries certainly, but nationally, and to try to use what one might call the national spirit which came out during the election—whether you think it was spoof or whether you think it was genuine, does not matter; it came out—and to devote that national spirit to a national spirit in industry as well as in politics. If you want to do that, I suggest that there should be a much greater educative system in industry and that the Board of Trade, as the fountain head of that educational system, should seek to interest the workers in the welfare of the State and in the fact that they are cogs in the wheels performing a national task, and, coupled with the creation of that interest, should try to tell the country, through
the various methods of publicity that exist to-day, what we are really aiming at, what our definite objectives are, for each particular industry. If we could do that, I believe we should get the wheels of industry running more smoothly than they are to-day.
There is one other point, and that is that when we are planning this national industry for three, four, or five years ahead, we might try to avoid some of the shocks which we have had in the past few years. I was looking the other day at a chart by an eminent stockbroker, showing the rise and fall in security values, and the rise and fall in commodity prices since the War, and it showed that the peak was reached in 1928, since which we have been going down; and every time a crash has occurred—the Hatry crash, the Kreuger and Toll crash, and so on—you could see, each time, a big jump down, then a small subsequent recovery, and then the slump continuing. We have to stop these shocks, because no financial system can hope to recover as long as we have repetitions of such things as the Kreuger and Toll business.
In the Estimates that we are discussing to-day there is a Board of Trade Companies Department, and I would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman what that particular Companies Department does as regards fulfilling the letter of the law absolutely in the way of insisting that companies file their accounts and submit the necessary documents within the specified time; whether the Department is satisfied that the companies which exist to-day in this country are for the most part working according to the high standards of national finance; and if he thinks he has sufficient powers to ensure that that small but discreditable minority, which does us so much harm to the confidence of the country as well as to the profits of individual electors, can be brought to book under the present regulations.
We have to control in the future, in some way—good Tory as I wake up every morning and try to be—the investments of British nationals. It has been recognised by the Federation of British Industries in a somewhat guarded way—not that they are particularly my ideal body —but it has been recognised on all sides.
It is snob a vast subject, touching such issues as the State interfering with private enterprise and such questions as whether or not the (Stock Exchange control to-day is sufficient as regards the listing and quoting of securities; but could there be an inquiry set up by the Board of Trade at some time in the near future to go into the whole question and see whether the matter could be dealt with, possibly by legislation in the future, though that question would be out of order to-day? Those are the two points that I would like to put before the right hon. Gentleman. There is, first, the question of national planning, to bring everybody into the picture, to interest all those engaged in industry in the progress of this country, and, secondly, to safeguard by every possible means our progress from financial shocks, which have been one of the curses of the post-War years.

Sir FREDERICK MILLS: I do not think anybody will accuse me of having spoken out of my turn. I have been sitting here for several months, and it has been a great joy to me to-day to hear from the President of the Board of Trade the first words of comfort that I have heard in this House. As I dare say some hon. Members know, I call myself an industrialist. Only two or three years ago I led a busy life, with no thought of ever coming to the House of Commons, and it is because my particular industry stopped dead, I suppose, that I find myself here. Before I approach that particular industry, I want to touch upon the subject of coal, which has been mentioned by some of my hon. Friends below me, none of whom, I think, will accuse me of lack of sympathy with or interest in the coal miners, of South Wales in particular. I spent 30 years among them and lived among them, and I know a good deal about them, and I know a great deal about their sufferings at the present time.
The personal interest is always to be deplored if it can be avoided, but I think the personal interest here is worthy of mention, because I spent 30 years on the borders of South Wales in charge of a very large concern, which was one of the earliest of the iron and steel and coal concerns which went in for rationalisation, long before rationalisation became
the cure for all the ills from which industry suffers. Whatever difficulties we suffer from at the present time, they are not due to a lack of rationalisation, because we rationalised, as I say, years before it became fashionable, and from controlling, as I did 30 years ago, 6,000 workpeople, we got up to 35,000 workpeople, and we were self-contained in almost every degree. It is because of what has happened there that I say I am glad to hear the words of comfort which have come from the President of the Board of Trade to-day.
We have heard a great deal about the effects of recent happenings in the coal industry, and we have heard a great deal to-day about the difficulties in respect of the exportation of coal. I think that if we have made a, mistake in the past, it is that we have been disposed to regard the coal industry as an industry independent of others. I believe that the coal industry is the servant of other industries rather than their master, and I think that both coalowners and miners have taken up, if I may say so, a selfish attitude in years gone by and have disregarded the possibilities of what the coal mining industry means to this country. Those who have studied the subject will remember that the origin of coal mining and iron making in South Wales lay in the hill districts, where the coal was raised for the purpose of making iron, and it is only in late years, in the last two generations, that the export of coal has been regarded as an industry. We must not forget that for those two generations we have relied upon the export of coal to pay for practically the whole of our foodstuffs which we have been compelled to import. It is because the coal export has gone down to such an extent that we find ourselves, in part at all events, in the difficulties which have arisen in the South Wales district.
I want the House to consider this point, and I do not want to apportion any blame to anybody—I think it has happened—but, rightly or wrongly, Parliament has taken too great an interest in the actual doings of the South Wales coal industry in particular. The cost of getting coal in South Wales—and I am sorry that the Minister for Mines is not here—has trebled in the last 33 years, and I think the mining Members present
will agree with me that the men themselves have received no advantage out of the increase in the cost. Clearly the coalowners have not. The industry in South Wales, to all intents and purposes, is practically on its last legs financially. That was not so for a great number of years, and I suggest that a great deal of the fault is due to the fact that persistently one Parliament after another, whatever its complexion, has taken a hand at the manipulation of agreements, settled wages, and, in short, has almost controlled the industry, and, at the end of it—because I call this the end of it— if something better does not happen, the industry will practically be bankrupt. I hope that whatever is going to be done this year in the mining industry will be done outside the House of Commons, and that the owners and men will be left to conduct their negotiations in their own way and arrive at their own conclusions. Perhaps I am a little old-fashioned, but I am afraid that I do not support those five-year plans. I am not a believer in partial Socialism; I am a believer in individualistic effort, and I do not think for one moment that the coal trade, particularly in South Wales, would have got into its present unfortunate position if it had been left to conduct its own affairs.
I wish to say a word or two upon the companion industry, that is, the steel industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Abertillery (Mr. Daggar) and those associated with him attended a meeting the other day to see what industries could be introduced into their neighbourhood to take the place of the industry which has fallen down. There can be no other material industries in a district like that. The industries which are indigenous to such districts will have to be revived, or those districts must go down. More than 50 per cent. of the cost of steel depends upon two items—the cost of coal and the cost of railway rates. The cost of coal has gone up three times in the last third of a century, and obviously, unless there has been improvement in manufacture, the cost of coal must be a very important item in the cost of producing steel. Fortunately, there have been, particularly at Ebbw Vale, very great improvements in the use of coal and in its employment in the blast furnaces. There are no more important and no more
modern furnaces than those which have been built there during the last 10 or 12 years. Their cost per ton compares favourably with that of any other blast furnaces in the world, and their cost for fuel cannot, I believe, be beaten by anything in Europe. Notwithstanding that fact, the industry has fallen down.
One of the ways in which coal can be reduced in cost is by the adoption of other methods of obtaining coal. I have had an opportunity of explaining to the Minister of Mines the result of a recent visit which I paid to the United States of America. There, in apparently similar circumstances, and in similar conditions, coal is being wrought and brought to the surface for about one-third of the cost of that in South Wales. They have diminished the danger to life by a very large amount. Their safety compares most favourably with ours. I have invited the Minister of Mines to consider these methods and have them examined by experts on both sides. I am not a mining expert, although I have been associated with coal for 50 years, and therefore I do no more than draw the attention of the Minister of Mines to these facts and ask him to have them looked into.
In regard to steel, the symptoms of decay have been showing themselves for a very long time. I distinctly remember in 1898 the first introduction of American steel into this country at a dumped price, and with a very few exceptions, including particularly, of course, the War period and the period of the Ruhr occupation, that industry has been subject the whole time, more or less, from one country or another, to persistent and unnecessary dumping. That is the principal cause of the decadence of the steel industry in this country. The steel industry is different from almost every other industry. The materials are expensive, very large quantities are required, and the turnover is enormous. When I tell you that the turnover of my late company was something in the nature of £6,000,000 a year, it will be seen that you have to deal with very large figures, and that they are subject to very large fluctuations if they are interfered with, as they have been for 30 or 40 years, by these extraordinary incursions of unnecessary foreign steel which prevent the steelmaker from
being master in his own house. It is the principal cause of the state in which the steel industry finds itself.
It is not a question of labour. I desire to pay testimony to the labour which has been employed for so many years in the iron and steel industry. In my judgment, it is the best in the world. On my frequent visits to America I have found working there men who had been under me. They have been sent all over the world, and they are, from the technical and skilful point of view, the best in the world. They have the best record in regard to disputes. Ever since the Conciliation Board in the iron and steel trade was established some 45 or 50 years ago, I believe I am correct in saying, there has not been a dispute of any magnitude in the iron and steel trade in this country, which is a testimony I am glad to give. Moreover, they enjoy, I think, the highest wages of any workpeople in the country through the adroitness in the manipulation of the circumstances by Mr. John Hodge, who was for many years a Member of this honourable House. We as employers were always glad to pay these wages, because, we believe in good wages, and we know that if we pay them and get good work we can get a low cost per ton. So that there, again, that has not been the cause of our difficulties.
The industry requires very expensive tools and machinery. It costs to-day more than £1,000,000 to build a pair of modern blast-furnaces, and no one can venture upon such an expenditure unless he is satisfied that he will have a decent run and be able to employ those furnaces in a proper way, which is to say, run them night and day until they require relining. It has been said that we in South Wales have become the world's experts at stopping and starting blast-furnaces. The blast-furnace, of all things in the world, is the thing which wants to be kept running smoothly. The rolling-mills and producing departments are all very expensive, and unless you employ the best and keep up-to-date you cannot obtain a low cost. It is because we have been compelled to work in and out, through this constant dumping of foreign steel, that the English, Scottish and Welsh ironmasters have not been able to keep their places up to the pitch of
perfection that they would otherwise have been able to do. It is not that they have not the knowledge, the brains and the technical ability.
The President of the Board of Trade, in his opening speech to-day, referred to the marvellous inventions that have been produced in this country over long periods of years. He referred to the invention of aniline dyes. I knew the inventor of aniline dyes, and I remember how he deplored the fact that his own country would not give him any protection and that he had to go to Germany to get this wonderful invention taken up. It was only because of the exigencies of the War that we were able to get it back again. Most of the inventions in metallurgy have been the product of this country. Bessemer, Siemen, Nasmyth and Cort are names that occur to anyone in this connection. There is hardly an invention of any kind in heavy metals which has not come from this country. It is not 'because we lack the technical ability, or the brains, or the staff, but because we lack security in this industry to enable us to go on, to have the knowledge that we shall have for that industry the home market for ourselves, and to obtain encouragement for the enlargement and perfection of our plant.
What about the 3,000,000 tons of steel that came into this country last year Every ounce of that steel could have been made in this country. There is nothing difficult about making it. The absence of that 3,000,000 tons of steel, representing something of the order of about 30 per cent. of the total output of steel in this country, prevented us from having the output which is necessary in order to obtain a low cost. Before the War we made the cheapest steel in the world. In 1913 a 5 per cent. tariff would have done the trick. In 1929 a 10 per cent. tariff would have done the trick. Whether a 331 per cent. tariff, which I hope is what we are going to get, will be sufficient, I cannot say—at any rate, not immediately—but it will help. I am satisfied that it is no use giving a tariff for a short period. You must give a tariff for at least 10 years. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am glad to hear those cheers from the benches below me, because I want to say to those hon. Members that they have to learn to say "tariffs," and to believe in them. It is not the least
use to talk as they have been talking for the last 30 years as to the non-efficacy of tariffs. They have to learn, and they will learn by experience, that tariffs are the things upon which we have to rely.
Who pays the duty? I think the President of the Board of Trade is aware of the fact that the 10 per cent. duty on steel is being paid by the importer. The price of steel before the 10 per cent. duty was 81s. To-day it is 76s., duty paid. We shall find that if we put on tariffs which are sufficiently protective to keep out most of the stuff, but sufficiently inducive to enable some of it to come in, it will serve a double purpose. We shall find that if the importer wants to import he will import, and he will pay the tariff. That is the universal experience all over the world. When I have heard some of my right hon. Friends during the past five months complain that tariff countries were in as bad a position as we are, I would have liked to remind them, as I remind them now, that from my own experience in those countries I have not heard one man either in America, France or Germany suggest that they would do away with their own tariffs because they have not been successful during the last two or three years.
8.30 p.m.
I rejoiced to hear the President of the Board of Trade to-day. I congratulate him on his courageous policy. Having introduced a new system or, rather, reverted to the old system, I wish him God speed in his work. I am satisfied that the confidence that he and those associated with him have inculcated in this country is going to produce the effect that we want, that is, a diminution of unemployment. I recognise that that is the test that will be applied when the National Government goes to the constituencies. If we do not succeed in reducing the number of the unemployed, very few of us will come back again, but it is my belief that the right start has been made and I have confidence in the National Government and particularly in the President of the Board of Trade.

Mr. CAPE: It is not my intention to take up much time. I have listened very attentively to the speech of the hon. Member for East Leyton (Sir F. Mills). It was a very interesting speech, coming from a man who has had a long experience in industry from the employers' side.
In many respects I say, without hesitation, that I am in agreement with him on certain matters that he raised. In regard to his statement about the steelworkers and the magnificent way in which they have conducted their negotiations in regard to wages and conditions of employment, I endorse everything that he said because, although a miner by occupation, I live in a steel manufacturing district and I know the various officials who carry on the work of the Iron and Steel Confederation. Can the hon. Member say the same about the position of the iron and steel workers, their conditions of employment and their wages, in the countries where tariffs have been imposed?
I often find that those hon. Members who talk on trade matters seem to think that here is only one portion of the community interested in trade, and that is the manufacturing portion, the captains of industry. They generally forget to include the workmen as part of the industrial concern and as someone who ought to be recognised in the interests of the organisation. The hon. Member told us that he has been in America and in nearly every Continental country, in his avocation as a large employer of labour. He will have made himself conversant with the conditions and wages of the men employed in various industries, and I suggest to him that if he could tell us that the conditions and the wages of the workers in the Continental countries where steel and iron are manufactured are better than the wages and conditions of our people and if, further, he can tell us that under tariff reform our conditions, if they are better than those of foreign countries will remain better, I shall not particularly care how it comes about, so long as our workers get reasonable conditions and good wages.
I am not going to deal with the coal situation, because it has been dealt with by some of my colleagues, but I should like to criticise that part of the hon. Member's speech in which he stated that he thought the. Government ought to leave the employers and the workmen in the mining industry to settle matters for themselves. He ought to know, because I think he has had some experience as a coalowner, that if we are left to ourselves all the taking will be on one side and all the giving on the other.
I cannot understand how it is that, although you meet the same employers in the iron and steel industry as you meet in the coal mining industry, they can come to agreement with their people without having resort to any lock-outs or stoppages, but when you discuss with these same gentlemen as coalowners they are the most impossible class of people it is possible to meet. They seem to change their position and outlook on industrial life. I have often thought that it was a case of selfishness, wishing to make more out of the industry than they ought to do. I hope I am wrong, but that suspicion is very strong in my mind. If we are to settle the question that is now on the horizon, shortly to come into full view, the mining situation, then the National Government has one of the gravest tasks it will have to face in the whole of its career. We do not want a dislocation of industry. There is not an hon. Member on these benches with all his failings who desires to see any conflict in the mining industry. We want a peaceful settlement, and it should be the work of the Government to see that both sides get together, to keep a watch on the proceedings of both sides, and by their help to get an amicable settlement of the situation before the 8th July this year.
The President of the Board of Trade made a most remarkable speech when you consider who the President of the Board of Trade is. I have heard him speak many times in this House as one of the chief apostles of Free Trade and the benefits it confers upon this country. Now, when he is in the responsible position of being the third captain of the National Government ship, he tells us of the glories and the great things which are going to happen because of certain Measures passed by the National Government at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. I can quite understand that as the father of these proposals he is net going to decry them. He is going to make them look as good as he can. He is an adept at manipulating figures, and does so in a very masterful sort of way. He tried his best to take our minds off the real issue before the Committee by asking us whether we could tell him of any productive industry conducted nationally which had been a success.
I do not know of any productive industry which is controlled by the Government, and, therefore, how could the right hon. Gentleman, knowing this, expect us to give him an answer? But we do know of lots of industries conducted by private enterprise which have been a ghastly failure. If they had been conducted by the Government they could not have been greater failures.
Finally, I desire to say something in regard to my own district. The President of the Board of Trade has told us that the heavy industries are not showing any signs of prosperity, and with that statement we shall all agree. In the district I have the honour to represent coal mining, iron and steel production, and iron ore mining, are the chief industries. There are also subsidiary industries. In that industrial area we have at the present moment nearly the highest percentage of unemployment of any district in the whole of the British Isles. I live at Workington and the other day there was a meeting of the local authorities committee to review the situation. That conference passed a resolution which I expect has been conveyed to the Board of Trade to the effect that they intended to ask the divisional controller to use his best endeavours with the Board of Trade to institute an industrial survey pf West Cumberland. I hope the Board of Trade will grant the request of the local authorities committee for this in dustrial survey, because it is not a question of pits stopping and being reopened again, the fact is that a number of the mines will never be reopened again, they are completely worked out; and unless other industries can be induced to come into that locality in a few years time it will become a desolate and derelict area.
All that we ask, being a shy and modest people, is that this industrial survey shall he made so that the Board of Trade will be able to suggest to some of these hundreds and thousands of people who are now applying for sites for factories in this country, that they should take up a site in this area. Surely we shall be able to get one. That is not asking for very much, and it will help us to absorb some of our unemployed. The situation is grave and during the last three months the figures of unemployment have gone up by nearly 2,000 in that very small area.
Those on the industrial side as well as those on the employers' side, and men and women of good will who are not directly interested in either the employers or workmen, regard the position with the gravest concern and are apprehensive as to what is going to be the situation in the immediate future unless something happens. I feel sure that the Parliamentary Secretary will look into this matter, and I shall be very glad to have a talk with him upon it.

Mr. MOLSON: I wish to support what the hon. Member for Limehouse (Mr. Attlee) said in urging upon the Government the importance of doing something definite to assist the depressed areas. I have had a little experience in the past in a depressed area and, although my most vivid recollection perhaps of my sojourn there is that of having forfeited my deposit at the end of an election, yet I retain a very friendly and affectionate feeling for the people of that area. I would urge upon the Government that some sort of definite measures will have to be taken. Having heard how many new factories are being started in this country, it seems to me that we have now a great opportunity of trying to encourage these new industries to start in depressed areas and not to come drifting down into the South of England. We welcome new industries wherever they may start, but when one considers the waste of man power and the waste in other respects which is involved in industrialising parts of the country which are now agricultural, and allowing those parts of the country to become derelict which for a century or more have been the centres of our great basic industries, it surely is clear that we must endeavour to carry out at once one branch of that national planning of which we have heard so much to-day in all parts of this Committee. I have here some figures which are not official but which have been worked out very carefully. They represent an attempt to estimate the cost to the community of transferring a man from an industrial area and constructing the necessary housing, roads and other things necessary in order to industrialise an agricultural area. My informant having gone into a number of calculations says:
This would give an expenditure of £495 per industrial worker. This figure would include houses with the necessary schools,
churches, shops, buildings, factories, gas, water and electric supply, roads, sewers and all such matters, but it does not, however, include factory machinery and equipment.
He makes another calculation as a check, looking at the matter from a different point of view, and he arrives at a capital cost of £433. The truth probably lies between the two. There are three principal reasons why these new factories which are being started sometimes by foreign and sometimes by British firms, are tending to go to Slough, to Buckinghamshire, to Hertfordshire, to Bent and are not tending to go to South Wales, to the North-East coast, or to Lancashire. The first is a psychological reason. There is, unfortunately, an impression abroad that those centres which were chosen by the old industries because of their special advantages are now down and out. Another reason is the burden of rates, and a third reason, I think, is the apprehension, which may or may not be well-founded, that in those industrial areas trade unions are more powerful and insist upon restrictions which they are either unable to enforce or do not endeavour to enforce in the South of England. In this matter, though we may ask for a lead to be given by the Government, we may also ask the trade union leaders of this country to co-operate with employers to do away with the impression, which may be fallacious but is certainly widespread, that in those industrial areas owing to labour conditions it will be difficult for industries to thrive.
In the evening papers yesterday appeared a document which was said to have been issued by the French Ministry of Commerce. Whether it was a genuine document or not, I do not know. I understand that the French Ministry of Commerce has denied its authenticity, but the fact remains that what was said in that document about the unrest which is supposed to exist and the trade union restrictions in the depressed industrial areas of this country, represents a view very widely held abroad. It is largely for that reason that foreign industrialists are choosing the agricultural parts of the country in which to put up their works. I would appeal to the trade union leaders to do what in them lies to assist the local authorities of South Wales and other depressed areas to make those areas as attractive as possible to industrialists.
I think the hon. Member for Lime-house was perfectly entitled to ask the Government to take this matter into their earnest consideration. We Conservatives are proud of the great de-rating Measure passed by the last Conservative Government, but there was one argument put forward from the Labour benches in the discussion of that Measure which is absolutely sound. It is that although a great burden has been taken off industry, still, relatively, the advantage of Buckinghamshire or Berkshire over Aberdare or the North-East coast remains exactly as it was. Although now the industrialist is only paying one-quarter of the rates that he was paying before, whereas in some of the agricultural areas the rates are perhaps only 5s., 6s. or 7s. in the pound, in places like Aberdare they are or were 28s. in the pound. I ask the Government to consider carefully what they can do for these areas. Some of the great basic industries upon which our past prosperity was built up are not merely temporarily depressed because of the economic world crisis but are never likely again to revive and employ the number of men which they employed formerly. Surely at this time it is necessary to make preparations for the day when some measure of prosperity will come back. Surely it is a time to try to put whatever new industries are coming to the country into the depressed areas.
It is no answer to my argument to say that there should be transference of the unemployed from the places where they are now to new areas. We must consider the appalling waste which is involved. We must consider not only the loss but the suffering involved when men who have, perhaps, bought their houses are asked to move to other parts of the country with no security that they are going to find work when they get there. We have to consider what is involved in asking people to leave surroundings which, however dingy, are at any rate familiar, and to leave in many cases other members of their families behind. I hope that something can be done about this matter. A great deal has been written lately in analysis of this problem, and I think there is agreement upon the points which I have just put. But, so far, I have seen very few constructive sugges-
tions for dealing with the problem and greatly venturing I would like to make one or two.
I understand that one enterprising industrial town in the Midlands in order to induce a factory to come there offered to exempt it from rates for a period of years. That course unfortunately was found to be illegal and the rates afterwards had to be paid by that factory. I wonder whether it would be possible for the Government to exempt for a period of time new factories willing to go into depressed areas from rates? I wonder whether it would be possible, as one small measure, to exempt in the Budget, all company reserves which were earned in these areas from Income Tax? Would it not be possible in that way to do something for concerns which are willing to start new factories in depressed areas? Of all the costs which weigh heavily upon industries, there is none which is a greater burden, which more definitely discourages employment than the contribution which has to be made by the employer in respect of each man he employs. It is obviously an anomalous and absurd situation that when a concern is endeavouring to increase the number of men that it employs it is penalised for every additional man that it takes on. I wonder whether the Government could consider some relaxation, some concession, some sort of subsidy of that kind in order to encourage these new industries not to come down into the south of England and spoil the rapidly diminishing English country side, but to go to the great depressed areas where there is most unemployment, most suffering, most privation and bring work and some hope to those who at present are in despair of ever finding work again.

Mr. HALES: In these times of quotas and rationing, it is the turn of the North Staffordshire potteries to have a little consideration in this House. We have heard so much about wheat, coal, steel and iron that our little industry in that corner of Staffordshire seems to have been neglected. I am sorry that the President of the Board of Trade is not sitting on the Treasury Bench, for I bring him a message from 250,000 people who are looking to him to be the saviour of that industry next Tuesday. I am surprised and sometimes amused at the shafts which are hurled across the Table at the right hon. Gentleman because he
has realised at long last what has to come in this country. I admire a man who can change his mind and with a sphinx-like character stand at that Box while jibes are hurled at him. Nothing seems to touch him. There he sits unruffled. That is why we in North Staffordshire base our faith on him. We have a two-fold belief in him, for he is not only holding now what we for 25 or 30 years have believed must come, namely, tariffs, but he is a business man. There are too few business men in this assembly. There is too much wandering and meandering and a little too much time spent on what, like Bovril, could be compressed.
9.0 p.m.
We are dealing in the Potteries with an industry which has been languishing and gradually losing its foreign and home trade for years past. It is only those who get outside of England, who go into the far corners of the world selling the products of that industry, who can understand why we are losing our business, why the foreigners, like rats, are nibbling at the foundation of our overseas trade, why we see Czechoslovakia, France and other countries taking markets which we have held for a century. When the Abnormal Importation Duties came into force, the district which I represent took a new lease of life. At long last Britain had come to realise that we must cease to be the dumping ground of the world and that we must hold the right amount of trade which is our due; but, in the interval from the introduction of the duties to their becoming operative, the wily foreigner took good care to make the most of his time, and he threw into this country thousands of pounds worth of goods which up to now have prevented any benefit coming to my district. These stocks remain in this country and must be liquidated and absorbed before the pottery district can have the benefit of the new duties. What will be the feelings of dismay and consternation if, before we have the benefit of the Abnormal Importation Duties, they are reduced, and once more the foreigner is able to take the trade of our district. I should like the Advisory Committee to visit the district and to see the potteries and factories, which for centuries have been the talk of the world, but which are now closed down and are being converted
into building sites for shops. That is the position to-day, and names which once were world-wide are now looked upon with contempt and pity as something that was and is not now.
Six or seven months ago I was enabled to see that the crisis was coming, not from any especial knowledge of my own or from any cleverness or wisdom. I saw that the inevitable crisis was being forced upon us, because we could not for ever be paying out and not receiving. I travelled 6,000 miles with the certainty that any man who came before the electorate with the story of what must be done could walk into this House and take his seat. I was looked upon, as many others were, as a crazy lunatic to storm the citadel of Labour, which for 24 years had been represented by a Member of the Opposition Bench. He was a good man, but he had a wrong belief. The only fear I had, as the steamer came across those 6,000 miles, was whether the Labour party would give the duties before I got home, so that my journey would be useless. That was the fear that touched my throat, which made me say, "Shall I get there in time?" Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the Labour party, they missed the golden opportunity which would have placed them on the Government Benches with a magnificent majority.
I wish that hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Bench, who are as good patriots as any other Members, could come with me for one month to the East. If I were a rich man, I would pay their fares and expenses on condition that they would use the senses which God has given them and that when they came back they would act according to their convictions. I am certain if that were done those benches would be an empty and desolate waste. There are no Free Traders abroad. Any man who does not believe in tariffs is regarded as so curious that be ought to be enshrined in the museum. Sometimes we are asked some very awkward questions, and I hope I am in order in dealing with some of them now, because we all have pearls of wisdom which we want to save for the very rare occasions on which we can speak on these topics. A letter from Calcutta came to me a few weeks ago asking "Who is the outstanding Member of your Cabinet?" What a thing to ask!
How could I answer it? But in times of difficulty the mind works quickly, and I wrote back to say that the men on our front bench were all of such super-excellence that it would be invidious to make a, comparison, and I feel great satisfaction in having got out of that difficulty. Another man writes to me, "Now that you are in Parliament, put things right." In India my word goes. Here I am only 1/615th part of this great assembly. I had to write to explain that the destinies of England were handled by a body of men called the British Cabinet, and that for this year, at least, they must not expect to find me in that holy of holies. How they are going to manage without me until next session I leave them to guess.
But to come back to the potteries of North Staffordshire. If the duties have not been reduced, I want to take the President of the Board of Trade to that district, and he will have a reception there which will be comparable only to Christ's entry into Jerusalem. He will be regarded as the saviour of the district. They will not look upon him as a turncoat, or as a man who has changed his opinions. I would quote Scripture, which I understand one is allowed to do in this House. I forget the chapter and verse, because since November I have been more concerned with the OFFICIAL REPORT than with Holy Writ, but it says something like this. "There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that need no repentance." That is the case with our good Friend on the Treasury Bench.
In a serious moment or two before I sit down I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary to convey to the President of the Board of Trade my message, that North Staffordshire depends for its very life on the decisions which the Government, through the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will announce on the 19th April. It will be a matter of life and death for a quarter of a million souls. We have talked of depressed areas, but that is an area which is not merely depressed but which is almost hopeless. I got into touch with conditions there during the election. In the early days, before I was generally recognised, I put on an old coat and a cap, left myself unshaved, made myself look like an unemployed man, and got
into one of the queues of unemployed and talked to them. For the first time in my life did I understand the absolute desperation of them. One can understand a man committing murder, robbery or anything when not only he, but the wife and children dependent upon him, are short of bread. I shall never forget the kind of sullen indifference I encountered there—all the demands for work that I heard—anything to keep the wolf from the door—during the two hours I stood in that queue and got into converse with those downs and outs, who found that slowly but surely their right hands were losing their cunning. They were losing their manhood, and they were desperate and ready for anything. I might be the hon. Member for Gorbals (Mr. Buchanan) speaking. I hope sincerely that the President of the Board of Trade will give my district a chance for its life. If it is only an experiment let us try it, and let me go back with the feeling that at any rate I, a humble back-bencher, have brought to the notice of the President of the Board of Trade the necessities of my district.

Mr. D. MASON: I cannot compete with the hon. Member for Hanley (Mr. Hales) in the eloquent speech with which he has just addressed the Committee. His imagination and powers of expression lend a charm to his oratory which I will not attempt to emulate, but I can sympathise with him in his feelings about the desperate condition in which industry finds itself to-day in many parts of the country. The President of the Board of Trade, in his survey, was very complacent about the progress which had been made during the last six months, and attributed it in large measure to the policy of the National Government. I observe, also, that the Press, in commenting on the returns of the Board of Trade, take the view that we have turned the corner, and are now on the upward move towards a revival of trade. But if we examine the returns for February and March, what do we find? It is true that there has been some slight increase in exports, but there has also been a great falling off in imports. The true test of the trade of a country is, surely, the aggregate trade. It is that which, in the long run, will create the greatest amount of employment for the shipping industry, the docks, the railways, and all
the other accessories of trade and industry. In February, 1932, the aggregate trade amounted to £100,214,122 and in March it amounted to £92,315,713. That, I think, is the test of the falling off in the trade of this country, the exact reduction being £7,898,409.
While you may be making some progress in your export trade, if your falling off is very material in your import trade, then, obviously, there must be fewer people employed at the docks and on the railways, and the general falling off in employment must be greater in the long run. It may be argued that because there is some temporary increase, as undoubtedly there is, in what you do to increase employment in a particular factory in the country, if the aggregate trade falls—and the aggregate trade is surely the test of the trade of the country leading to the greatest amount of employment—then the system stands condemned. I do not think in the two months to which the President referred there is any evidence of an improvement in trade. On the contrary, the figures which have been given of the exports and imports for March compared with February, since these new duties have been in force, prove what has been predicted by many Free Traders, that while there might be increased prosperity in a certain direction, there would be a fall in the aggregate trade.
Take the shipping question. In normal years we have an income from shipping of something like £130,000,000 per annum. We have not that amount to-day. The City of London has been the monetary centre of the world, and that is due to the fact that we have been a Free Trade country. The City of London has an income of £60,000,000 or £70,000,000 from commissions and interest. That is a total income of £200,000,000 which comes to this country under the Free Trade system. When the hon. Member opposite speaks of the depression in the great basic industries of steel and iron and many other industries, the test as to what is the best system for this country and the most profitable is the test of the trade of the country as a whole. We Free Traders admit that there are many industries in this country which have been prosperous which, in the nature of things, if we
adhere to a Free Trade system, will possibly fail because of the superior skill and advantages which other countries have developed in those particular trades, with the result that they have overtaken this country.
It is true that people have to face distress and even ruin if they persist in carrying on industries which are not suited to this country. Coventry was once a great centre of the woollen industry, and it changed over to the manufacture of watches. The competition with Switzerland and other Continental countries became too severe, and Coventry became a great centre for the manufacture of bicycles and motor cars. The people of the City of Coventry, under Free Trade, showed that they possessed a great adaptability in changing over, and what applies to the City of Coventry applies to Great Britain as a whole. If we are prepared, as apparently we are, in order to meet great depression and great distress to bolster up certain industries by adopting a tariff, it may give some temporary advantage to those particular industries, but it may undermine and remove the foundations which enabled this country under Free Trade to build up foreign trade second to none in the history of the world before the War.

Mr. HOWARD: If the hon. Member will look up the statistics of our overseas trade for 1900 to 1914, he will see that Germany and the United States were advancing faster than we were.

Mr. MASON: Those countries advanced because their foreign trade at that time was comparatively small compared with the trade of Great Britain.

Mr. HOWARD: The advance was so great that Germany was beginning to overtake all her competitors.

Mr. MASON: It is true that those countries made considerable advance, more particularly Germany, but I am right in saying that the foreign trade of this country was the greatest in the world prior to the Great War. While I admit that the foreign countries mentioned by the hon. Member were making considerable progress by their improved methods of doing business, Great Britain was preeminent in carrying on the greatest foreign trade the world had ever seen,
and that enabled this country to accumulate those enormous reserves which enabled it to finance a large part of the Great War. Those reserves, of which we have a considerable remnant left, constitute the backbone and sinews of the London money market. I suggest to the President of the Board of Trade that, for the sake of temporarily giving a fillip to certain industries, it is a short-sighted policy to bolster up and support industries which, for various reasons, are disappearing from this country.
I have referred to the shipping industry and the exceptional position of Great Britain as the monetary centre. We are anxious to see a revival of trade and industry in this country, but it is a fact that London as a great monetary centre is dependent upon Great Britain being maintained as a Free Trade country, if as a result of a Free Trade system we still retain London as the monetary centre, then you attract to London the loan capital of the world, and you get a great flow of loanable capital seeking investment in London. That provides the foundation for all countries all over the world to come to London to float a loan. If the loan is floated in this country, it goes out of the country either in goods or services. If the conditions are favourable in London and a loan is floated for £2,000,000, £3,000,000 or £5,000,000 for the extension of the Buenos Aires and Southern or any other South American railway, it does not go to America in cash, but in steel rails, locomotives or other equipment. Therefore, the fiscal policy which enables London to retain its position as a great monetary centre lays the foundation for that revival of prosperity for which we are all anxious.
We are all animated by that desire and I give that credit to the hon. Member for Hanley and to other hon. Members. We may not agree but we all desire it and are all moved to offer our views as to what is likely to increase the happiness, prosperity and contentment of the people. We may differ as to the method. I am trying to show to the hon. Member opposite what I consider is the best way, and he can try to persuade me, for I hope I am not narrow-minded or prejudiced not to be willing to learn from him as I hope he is willing to learn from me.
So we all offer our suggestions to this House, which is probably the most impartially minded assembly in the world, and which is courteous beyond a degree in listening to the views of a man who has anything to say and desires to put his ideas into the common stock. I am humbly offering to-day my ideas as to what is best to help us out of the present depression.
The President of the Board of Trade was once a valued colleague of my own, a man whom I looked to as one of the best apostles of the Free Trade system, which I still support and adhere to. Like many others, no doubt he may have become disheartened at the long-drawn-out agony, depression and distress and has given up his former ideals and beliefs and for some reason or another has been won over to those who believe that you can, by using his policy as a weapon, compel other countries to reduce their tariffs. There are many who are Free Traders at heart, but who say that unless you have this weapon you cannot compel other countries to reduce their tariffs.

Mr. HALES: May I ask two questions? How does the hon. Gentleman make his fiscal argument apply equally to the days when we were the workshop of the world and now that we are the purchasers? How can you possibly pay debts in goods or services when the American debt has to be paid in cash, because the adverse balance of trading is four to one on America? You cannot pay in services when you have an adverse balance.

9.30 p.m.

Mr. MASON: I do not subscribe to the idea of an adverse balance of trade. There is no such thing as an adverse balance of trade. There is an adverse balance of payments. It is very difficult to know what the figures are, because the Board of Trade cannot supply us with reliable figures as to the adverse balance of payments. This country is a creditor country and has something like £4,000,000,000 invested abroad, and these rentiers who own the investments continually change them so that it is almost impossible to know exactly what the figure is. When you have a creditor country, as we are still, it means that an excess of imports over exports is a good thing and not a bad thing, and for this reason. If you have a large section of
your community composed of people who have made fortunes, say, in South America or India and who come and reside in this country, they are not producers or exporters. They are merely users of their dividend warrants which they cash, and, by the purchases they make, either in silks, satins, wines or other requisites, they go to swell the imports of this country and have no affect whatever on the export trade. So, with a country such as Britain, which is a creditor country, it is a good thing when there is a large excess of imports over exports. There has been a good deal of nonsense in the newspapers and in public speeches suggesting it is a healthy sign when your exports are increasing and your imports declining. To my mind it is evidence of quite the contrary. It is evidence of a declining wealth in this country. A good many people are probably living on their capital to-day. That is the reason why imports are declining. When you are accumulating capital and your people have made fortunes in different parts of the world and come to England to reside, they swell your imports because they are not exporters and engaged in industry. They are living in the west end of London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow or other large centres, and they are rentiers. They are merely surrenderers of their dividend warrants and of the interest on bonds or securities which they have probably invested in various parts of the world. That goes to swell the imports of, say, silks, and satins, for the dresses of the women of their household, and the other expenses which are incurred by the classes with large investments. What do we do? We pay America in either goods or services.

Mr. HALES: In cash.

Mr. MASON: In goods, services or by the surrender of these coupons. These go to make up the debt which we owe to America.

Mr. MABANE: How is it possible for imports now to exceed exports unless at some time in the past exports have never exceeded imports?

Mr. MASON: Not for many years and not in my lifetime have exports exceeded imports.

Mr. MABANE: Then how did we accumulate the balance?

Mr. MASON: We accumulated it just because we have been so rich. It is a curious thing, but if you study the history of the country you find that for many years there has always been an excess of imports over exports. That is a most extraordinary fact. If the hon. Member will study the facts which I have ventured to submit to him, he will find that in his lifetime there has been a continuous annual excess of imports over exports in this country. The reason for that is, as I have just stated, that we are a creditor country, and it is an indication of our wealth, and not of our poverty. On the other hand, in Australia, for example, as a result of an extravagant policy, there has been overborrowing, and the fact that Australia's imports have exceeded her exports is a reason for disquiet, which has created a certain amount of unrest and want of confidence in Australia. That is because Australia is a debtor country as compared with this country. It indicates that she is living beyond her means and getting into debt. Many people foresaw that Australia was pursuing a policy of over-borrowing and extravagance, and they said that sooner or later she would suffer for that policy.
If hon. Members will look up the statistics of the last 20 years, they will find that in this country from year to year during that period, there has been a continuous excess of imports over exports, and under that system this country has grown wealthy. The resources which we accumulated under the Free Trade system, made us the carriers of the world. Even to-day we build nearly half the ships that are built, and we own about one-third. I am sure hon. Members will agree with me that, when we travel round the world, we are proud to see that in every port the bulk of the shipping is flying the British flag. That position is in jeopardy to-day. I do not think we have lost it yet. I do not think that a 10 per cent, tariff is going to ruin us. I am not one of those who prophesy that this experiment—I hope it is only an experiment—will ruin this country, but I offer the warning that it is coquetting with a very dangerous system, which may become permanent. Hon. Members who are enthusiasts in their
belief may desire that it should be permanent, and I can only refer them, as a warning, to the history of this country, and point out to them what we did under the system of Free Trade. It is true that, as the result of the War and its terrible heritage of debt, and the piling up of costs, things are very hard for many industries, and they have my fullest sympathy, though it may be said that that is cold comfort to a man who is just carrying on and not able to meet competition from Czecho-Slovakia, Germany and other countries which are able to operate at a lower cost.
As to the remedy, I come back to the question, How is prosperity to be restored to this country? I have no short cut to offer, but I do say that such a restoration of prosperity is possible if we will pursue the same policy that we formerly pursued—a drastic policy of economy—and if we get back, as I hope we shall in time, to a sound system of finance and restore the Gold Standard in this country. Some may ask what advantage that offers, and how will it improve trade? If the position of London is restored as the monetary centre of the world—and obviously that cannot be done unless we get back to gold—it will prepare the ground for the flotation of these loans, and we shall become again the bankers of the world. No other country is able to take the leadership in finance. The Americans and the French, with all their gold holdings, are unable to take the leadership. It rests in this City of London. Why is that?

Mr. HALES: Because we have a National Government!

Mr. MASON: The National Government can help. I am not an enemy of the National Government, though I have often been found in the Lobby against them, and I wish to give honour where honour is due. The position of London as a monetary centre depends on a number of factors. In the first place, geographically we have a unique position. I do not think that New York or Paris will ever be able to rival London. But one reason above all others why London has been, a great monetary centre, and may become so again, is that in the City of London there is the skill and knowledge, accumulated for many generations, with which other great centres are unable to com-
pete. There is inherent in the financiers and bankers of the City of London an unrivalled knowledge and experience of finance, and I hope we shall have the courage and the patience again to approach this problem in the old way. There is no short cut to great prosperity; I have no panacea to offer to bring about prosperity within a year; I am not here to say that I can conquer unemployment and bring about work and wages for all within a twelvemonth. I should be false to the beliefs that I hold I pretended that I had any such remedy. But I believe, from my knowledge of the history of my country and from some considerable knowledge of the City of London, that the same qualities are still there to-day, that there is the same integrity and grit and pluck and determination in our youth, and that, given good government, given economy, and given the opportunity, we shall again excel as we did in the past.
I wish to say to the President of the Board of Trade that I rejoiced at one of the concluding sentences of his speech. He plays up in a very noble and eloquent fashion to the Imperial position which he now occupies. He spoke of our Imperial trade, and of what we must do when we get to Ottawa. I also have had some experience of the Dominions, having lived for two years in Australia, knowing Canada, and having many friends throughout the British Empire. I resent the imputation that we on these benches, although few in number, are not equally seized with the desire to see the British Empire flourish and prosper and that we are not equally as proud of the British Empire, although hon. Members may not agree with our views. We have our own ideas. We desire to see our trade develop to the very utmost with the Dominions. We believe that our world trade, upon which our greatness was founded in the past, is our greatest asset, and, while anxious to develop our trade with our Dominions, I rejoice in the concluding sentences of the President of the Board of Trade, that he was anxious not only to develop our trade with our Dominions, but to look beyond to world trade, and, if he is inspired with that belief, he will find many supporters on these benches who will be willing to rejoice with him and to support him.

Sir S. CRIPPS: I do not propose to follow the hon. Member into the some-
what difficult topic of the correct form of administration of the Gold Standard by the President of the Board of Trade, or you, Sir, might think I was out of order, nor do I propose to follow the hon. Member for Hanley (Mr. Hales) in the consideration of whether the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Scotland should be put into a museum, because that again is perhaps hardly within the powers of the President of the Board of Trade, though it might be thought to be desirable by the hon. Member. I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary whether the Government are content that tariffs in themselves are an ultimate solution of the industrial problem of the country, or do they merely look upon tariffs as being a preliminary measure, and do they intend behind that tariff wall to take steps to deal with the industrial position of the country by other means.
The President of the Board of Trade expressed delight and pleasure at the prospect of foreigners coming here to set up factories. I wonder if he has studied the effects of the same phenomenon in Canada? I was speaking to a very influential Canadian only two days ago, and he was telling me of the disastrous effect that it had had upon Canadian industries in Canada. A great number of the larger industries in the United States started units in Canada with the latest machinery and the latest organisation, and overhead costs entirely borne by the foreign organisation in the United States or, as it might be in this country, in Germany and France, with the net result that the new foreign factory set up entirely put the native factory out of business. That may or may not be thought to be desirable, but it is one of the consequences that may flow from this influx of foreign competition into the country, and it is something which must not be disregarded. When one comes to take a survey of the whole industry of the country it is, I am sure, one of the factors that has to be carefully considered as to whether it is necessary and desirable in a particular industry to encourage this form of competition, and whether in the long run you are really going to benefit industry by permitting at this stage some new development of that type.
Most of the speeches this evening, which have been delivered to the empty benches, have dealt with particular, isolated industries. We believe that that is an entirely wrong way to look at the problem. The hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. L. Jones), who speaks with great authority on the steel trade, expressed the view that any planning must start from the bottom. That is to say, you must start your planning by individual industries and gradually, from that, build up a national plan. In our conception of the meaning of a national plan, that would be a perfectly useless procedure, because the whole purpose of a national plan, first of all, is to decide upon which industries must be developed and encouraged, possibly even at the expense of other industries.
We have had in the past a large number of export industries of various kinds on the exports of which we have depended for the purchase of raw materials and foodstuffs, together with invisible exports in the form of dividends and so on. The time has come when it is necessary to consider, in view of the entirely altered conditions of world trade brought about by the industrialisation of other parts of the world during the period of the War and after, which of those industries we have to develop to their utmost as export trades and which of them, perhaps, may no longer be paying propositions as export trades at all. That question cannot conceivably be decided by any single industry itself. If we have a certain amount of national wealth available for the reorganisation or re-planning of individual industries, those industries at present are all in competition in the market for the money that is available.
The hon. Member for Swansea West said one of the difficulties of the steel industry has been its inability to obtain any capital for reorganisation in the last period of 10 years. The reason was that that industry was in competition for capital with other more attractive sources. Another Member, I think the hon. Member for Thanet (Captain Balfour), spoke of the trouble of available capital resources going abroad. That is one of the factors which have been in competition with the steel industry for fresh capital. In the existing circumstances it seems impossible, unless some-
one takes a definite, controlling interest in the direction of that capital, to make it flow into those parts of the national economy where it is admittedly most required. It is in that aspect of national planning that we see the most extreme importance.
The view that I take of this matter is based upon Socialistic principles, but at the moment I am on the basis that any appeal of that sort to hon. Members opposite would obviously not meet with any response, besides which it would raise questions of legislation, which cannot be discussed to-night. What I am suggesting is that within the present system, circumstances being as they are, and tariffs being in existence, there is still ample scope for a planning arrangement. There is still ample scope and great utility in the consideration of how the available capital of the country can best be used in the interests of the country as a whole for the purpose of encouraging the industry upon which we must vitally depend for export in order to purchase our food requirements and raw materials.
That is a matter which, perhaps, the right hon. Gentleman or the Parliamentary Secretary would say they have no power to force. Be it so. There would yet be the greatest utility in having the plan, in being able to demonstrate to the country that this is a matter which has been carefully considered, that the Government have weighed the utility of mechanising the coal mines, reconstructing the steel industry, amalgamating the cotton industry or whatever it may be, that they have determined that in view of our industrial position in the world at the moment the first and most vital interest is, say, the reconstruction of the steel industry or whatever it may be upon the determination. There should be a thoughtful inquiry undertaken by the Government, to plan ahead not merely the next step, but to decide whether the great exporting industries could be brought into a state of competition in the world, or whether they are to be allowed to slide out of our great export industries. That plan would itself assist in directing capital into the right place. There must be many people in the City of London who, upon a, plan of that sort, if necessary backed by
guarantees by the Government, which they have power to do now, could very well direct available resources into the most desirable places, whereas at the present time, whether in boom or depression, it seems almost impossible to get the money into the right place.
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about squandering money. I am sure that he remembers very well the booms of 1928 and about that period. He remembers the gramophone and wireless companies that were floated to the tune of some £20,000,000. He remembers the 25 artificial silk companies, about 18 of which ought never to have been allowed to have a penny. Those companies had no more reason for starting than any other bogus company has, and the money that was squandered upon them might very well and usefully have been spent in reorganising some of the great basic industries. Why is it that the right hon. Gentleman and his Government cannot take some part in the proper direction of that capital? I am not suggesting that they set up a national Investment Board, as we should do, or anything of that sort. But by their influence, once the Government were armed with a plan, the right hon. Gentleman could put his hand on his heart and say," I am sure, on the best advice I can get and putting my own best construction on it, that the wise thing for the country to do with its available capital for the next five years is this and this and this," if that plan were before the City of London, he could persuade the City of London, if necessary by guarantees or in some other way, so to utilise our available resources in this country. I believe that it is only by so doing that we can bring ourselves into a state of international competition.
The right hon. Gentleman is fully aware, of course, of what the position is as regards the American steel trade, for example. It is estimated that between 1914 and 1926, 1,650 million dollars have been spent in rebuilding and modernising plant in the largest steel companies. Between 1926 and the present time an annual sum has been spent at the same rate. That is somewhere near 2,500 million dollars which have been spent in reorganising and modernising. That is the money the steel industry of this country has been crying out for and has been unable to get. If only there could have
been some means of directing our available resources into those channels, we as a country would have been much better off now than we are by having invested it in the gramophone and artificial silk and wireless and mining companies which have been floated. This money, as the chairman of Courtauld's said, has entirely gone down the drain.
10.0 p.m.
There is a second aspect of this problem which we believe to be also of very great and fundamental importance. The location of industry is in some ways almost as important as the question of the planning of capital, because by suitably locating industries you can do a tremendous lot to economise in the public services of the country. Not only that, but you can economise very greatly in the transport services, the dock services, all the services which are connected with an industry of any size at all. The element of geographical directional planning is one which the right hon. Gentleman seems to be disposed to leave entirely to the competition of the local development societies or whatever they may be—truly a somewhat casual way in which to deal with what is very largely the real wealth of the country. I venture to suggest that if the right hon. Gentleman was running this country as a huge business he would not leave location casually to be determined by anyone who liked to come, to put him as the owner of the property to such expense as he liked, without giving him any return for it. He would, I know, as any good estate manager would, say, "If you want to put down a factory on my estate you must put it down here. This is the convenient place. It fits in with the plan of my whole estate," just as a town planning authority does in the case of a town plan. Such an authority would say" You must not put factories here or there; it is not convenient. It would be inconvenient for traffic, for drainage, and for lighting."
Surely it is just as important to this country that we plan its available resources, as it is to some town or some city to plan its development. I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that that is a matter over which his Department could have a very large measure of control, without needing Any fresh legislation, and it is a matter which, taken
together with the other side of planning, is one which would produce a very large financial result in economies which, I am sure, the right hon. Gentleman desires to produce as much as anyone else.
Then there is another Aspect of the industrial problem which seems to us to have been entirely overlooked, not purposely, perhaps, though there has been no public statement of how it is being tackled or approached. That is the displacement of men by what is called rationalisation. There seems to be a general opinion in the country that if we could return to the happy days of 1913 in volume of production, we should cure the unemployment problem. That, of course, is a complete fallacy. The degree in which the productive capacity of man has increased since 1913 is hardly understood by some people in this country. I was looking at some figures the other day for one of the biggest and most up-to-date coal mines in this country, and I found, to my vast surprise, that the production in that particular mine was 40 cwts. per man per shift. The production for the whole of the district in which the mine was situated was somewhere about 26 cwts. per man per shift, and would correspond with a figure of somewhere about 20 cwts. in 1913. It requires very few large mines, on the basis of 40 cwts. per man per shift, to halve the labour that was required in 1913 to produce the same quantity of coal, and even if you could bring up your production of coal to as much as it was in 1913—and I do not think anybody with the wildest hopes would ever think of getting any higher at the present time—you would still have a vast problem of unemployment in the mines.
I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman what is being done to tackle that problem. That has nothing to do with getting more coal sold. I am assuming all that. I am assuming for the moment that he gets all the extra trade that he wants or could possibly expect, that the effect of the tariffs is everything he hopes. He will still be met with quite a different problem of unemployment, a problem far more difficult of solution even than the one upon which he is engaged at the present time. The one upon which he is now engaged is the one which arises from the cycle of trade, with depression and prosperity. That can be cured to
the extent that the prosperity can replace the depression and more men can be drawn into employment, but the continual effect of rationalisation will always stand out beyond and outside that problem, and the longer we live the more we shall see the effects of it. Some day or another the right hon. Gentleman or someone has got to think out an industrial policy which is going to cope with that question, and not merely with the question of increasing the markets up to the state that they were in, say, pre-War.
In that connection, it becomes necessary, obviously, for the right hon. Gentleman to concentrate upon the consideration of completely new industries which have got to take up some of these men who can never hope, under any circumstances, to get replaced in the industries in which they were formerly employed. In that respect there is one opening which was at one time being explored by the Government, and I should like the right hon. Gentleman or the Parliamentary Secretary to tell us what is happening as regards it now. That is the problem of oil from coal. It is a problem, as I know, of great difficulty. I have had the privilege of having many talks with Mr. Bergius, the original inventor of it. I think I have seen all its history, from the time of Mr. Bergius's first patent. But the period has now come when, according to the speech Sir Harry McGowan delivered this afternoon at the Imperial Chemical Industries general meeting, the problem has become one which is commercially possible. If I may read to the House a short extract from that speech, he said:
The year saw the successful conclusion of an Agreement between I. G. Farbenindustrie, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and your Company to form the International Hydrogenation Patents Company. This agreement was ratified in April, 1931. … All patent difficulties have been eliminated.
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, they were one of the chief things in the way.
The pooling of information and complete exchange of operating experience have produced a great improvement in the process for production of petrol from coal and liquid coal products, and have also enabled us to test British coals on plants alternative in design to our own.
That is no doubt the great German plant set up by the I. G. Farbenindustrie.
The full scale development of synthetic petrol will come in due time, stimulated by the national advantages which will arise from the establishment of the industry—strategic security, reduction of unemployment, relief to the national balance of payments, benefit to the coal-mining industry, etc. Far-sighted action has been taken by this agreement—founded, as it is, on an impregnable international patent position.
I suggest to the right hors. Gentleman that the time has come when this scheme, which has been talked of for so long in this country, owing to the patent situation and to nothing else—it is time that the Government took a definite hand in encouraging and assisting this scheme, which I believe no private company, however powerful, can carry through without Government assistance. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, I should like to see it carried through by, the Government itself entirely, but it is a system that, if it is to be started, must have a very large capital invested in it. A capital of something like £10,000,000 is about the minimum which is any use. But the problem which the right hon. Gentleman has to solve as regards the workers displaced by rationalisation is a problem so serious that the expenditure of £10,000,000, even on a chance of its succeeding, is, in our submission, very well worth while.
We are dealing here with what may be an enormous permanent charge on the State, a problem which is of great difficulty, and as far as we know at the present moment, unless the right hon. Gentleman has other ideas, there is no really large suggestion of a new industry before the country except this one. I feel confident that if the right hon. Gentleman inquired into it and was satisfied, as I think he would be, that technically it is perfectly sound, the country would be quite prepared to back a scheme which would lead to a very large increase in employment, not only in the coal industry itself, but in the operating industry that was connected with the actual production of the oil, the refining of the oil, and so on.

Me. RUNCIMAN: The hon. and learned Gentleman is now discussing a matter of first-rate importance. I am very grateful to him for raising the subject, but is it not the case that even now, when the patents difficulty has been straightened out, there is a complete gap
between the actual cost of the synthetic petrol and the market price of petrol which is in commercial use? We have considered the matter from the point of view of capital expenditure and from the point of view of its being self-supporting, but if the hon. and learned Gentleman has any light to throw on the latter question, I shall be grateful to have it.

Sir S. CRIPPS: I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman. He knows the figures, no doubt, very well, as regards the question of cost, but that is one of the reasons why it is absolutely essential for the Government to take part in it, because it is quite impossible for any artificial oil of any sort or kind, at present; prices of raw oil, to compete in any country; but, on the other hand, petrol has a considerable and large tax upon it in this country at the present time—and we should, I think, agree that if it was for the purpose of starting up a new industry of this sort, which is of vital importance to the future of the country, in these circumstances, with national control, of course, such a tax would be perfectly justified.
I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will tell us whether there is any hope that something of this sort may eventuate or whether there are any other plans which the Government have of dealing with this particular side of the problem, for the men who are permanently displaced by rationalisation in the industry altogether, apart from those who are tern porarily displaced by reason of the particular features of the depression in trade at the present time. We feel that it is not satisfactory for the National Government merely to introduce a tariff policy and then settle down in contentment. The vested interests, having obtained what they wanted, have left the House, and have no further interest in the discussion of industrial matters. We are discussing them with half-a-dozen or 10 people sitting on the National Government Benches. We do not believe that that is a satisfactory state of affairs, but that some really active policy should be carried on now that the tariff is here by which at least the country may be informed of its best interests, which nobody knows at the present time. Nobody can tell—I am sure that the hon.
Gentleman who is going to reply is quite incapable of telling me—whether it is better for the country at the moment to spend £10,000,000 on the coal mines or £10,000,000 on steel, if there is £10,000,000 available, or on cotton, or agriculture or any other industry. We believe that if some plan of that sort could be worked out by the Government, it could be used for directing the wealth and energies of the country into the most profitable channels, and could avoid the very waste which the right hon. Gentleman and we also are so anxious to see avoided in this country.

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Hore-Belisha): The Committee will have listened with great interest to the stimulating speech which the hon. and learned Gentleman has delivered, raising, as it did, a great many considerations, which must give rise to forebodings in the minds of all thoughtful persons, as, for instance, what is to be the outcome of a system under which fewer men can produce more and more. If one could give a really succinct answer to this and similar questions, it would help more quickly to dispel the depression in which the world finds itself to-day. But I would not be so presumptuous as to offer a facile solution to such very interesting queries. Unlike the hon. and learned Gentleman, to whom I hope to give some satisfaction, I propose to follow the arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. D. Mason), for on this occasion—and I congratulate him upon it—he made a speech which was appropriate to the Vote we were discussing. He dealt with the question of the balance of trade, a phrase which has frequently been used in the discussion to-night, and still more frequently in discussions outside. The redressing of the adverse balance of payments has been the central task of the Government. It is that task which has absorbed all their thoughts and all their time, and which has inspired all their acts up to the present moment. When the figures for the year were published, the worst forebodings were realised, and we found that we had an adverse balance of payments of £110,000,000.

Mr. D. MASON: An estimate.

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: Certainly, everything is an estimate unless one can gauge it with extreme scientific accuracy, which neither my hon. Friend nor myself can do with regard to these matters. But we can have general impressions, when our general impressions are not based upon preconceived notions. Our adverse merchandise balance last year was £411,000,000. The mere fact that you are receiving more in merchandise than you are sending abroad is not, in itself, a sign of calamity. But when the difference is not made up by other receipts, then, indeed, you are in a serious position. My hon. Friend would be the last to deny, for it is a matter of general knowledge, that our shipping receipts had declined, that our dividends on foreign investments had depreciated. That, I should have thought, even my hon. Friend would assume, inconvenient though it might be for the theory which he holds. The result was that, taking everything into account, we had an adverse balance of £110,000,000. Whether that adverse balance be exactly 110,000,900 within a few millions I will not bother to dispute with my hon. Friend, but that we had an adverse balance and that we had all the evidences of an adverse balance, in having to obtain credits abroad, and in a depreciated currency, is beyond dispute. It was desired by the electorate, indeed it was imposed upon us by necessity, that we should endeavour to redress this adverse balance of payments. There were only two ways of doing it. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend has made so many speeches on this subject that I really am acquainted with his arguments.

Mr. MASON: I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend, but when he speaks of those credits abroad he is really misleading the Committee. Those credits that were obtained in October last year were not to redress the adverse balance of trade or the adverse balance of payment. They were for the purpose of supporting the pound.

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: Whether or not they were to redress the adverse balance of trade, they were to get rid of the inconvenience of the adverse balance of trade, and the whole policy of this Government, a policy which was desired by the electorate and imposed upon us by
necessity, was to adjust the adverse balance. That could only be done in one of two ways—by reducing our purchases or by increasing our sales, or by both. The Government undertook the first part of that task in the Abnormal Importations Act, the result of which has been that we now can look at three clear months, and for those three clear months we have imported £15,000,000 less of manufactures than in the corresponding three months of last year. Even when one takes the exports into account, we have diminished our adverse balance of merchandise trade in the period by not less than £4,000,000. That is a very considerable achievement. My hon. Friend says there is no such thing as an adverse balance of trade—

Mr. MASON: Hear, hear!

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: —that there is no problem at all—

Mr. MASON: Hear, hear!

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: —and that there is no crisis.

Mr. MASON: Hear, hear!

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: If it had not been for the crisis, how does my hon. Friend explain his presence in this House? [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] Hon. Members opposite need not cheer. The crisis also explains the absence of so many of their colleagues. These matters, says my hon. Friend, settle themselves. Neither a nation nor an individual can buy more than it or he can afford. That is the argument of my hon. Friend. He says that you need not bother. I suppose you need not bother to balance the Budget. Taxes, in some mysterious way, will provide themselves. In the end, things reach a level. But it was not the policy of the Government to allow these matters to take their own course and, in the meantime, involve this country in a vast unemployment problem and in many other calamities. Accordingly, we have succeeded in reducing our adverse balance of trade. We have concentrated on keeping out of this country manufactured goods which, generally speaking, can be made here. What has been the outcome of that policy? In the industries which we were able to assist, a great improvement is
registered. You cannot, I agree, protect shipbuilding in that way, but you can protect your textile industries. The consequence has been that you have given the home market almost entirely to the woollen and cotton industries and—it is one of the factors—there has been a decrease in unemployment in the textile industries since last September from 38 unemployed out of every 100 men to 20 unemployed men out of every 100 men. That is to say, that out of every 100 employed in the textile industry 18 who were out of work have got back. In the cotton industry 45 men in every 100 were out of work last September; now there are 23 out of work out of every 100. In the woollen and worsted industry the 35 per cent. of unemployment has been reduced to 15 per cent. Surely that is a result which is worth producing.

Sir S. CRIPPS: Does not the Parliamentary Secretary see that the large increase has been in the export trade, particularly to China. Does he suggest that it is all home consumption?

10.30 p.m.

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: No, I said that it is one of the factors to be considered; otherwise, how does the hon. and learned Member explain the improvement in the woollen industry, where exports have not increased in the same manner? All that my hon. and learned Friend is proving is that you can reduce imports without damaging your export trade. The hon. Member for Aberdare (Mr. G. Hall) was sceptical about the increase of employment which has occurred generally in the country. I do not want to exaggerate the facts. The hon. Member asked me to give him the exact figures. I was under the impression that they had been given by my right hon. Friend, but I am willing to oblige him. At the end of September, 1930, there were 9,646,000 persons in employment in this country. At the end of March, 1931, there were 9,383,000 persons in employment, a reduction of 263,000. That reduction was intensified by September of 1931, when the numbers in employment fell to 9,326,000. To-day there are 9,549,000 persons in employment, an increase of 223,000 on September of last year and also an increase on March of last year. Therefore the policy of His Majesty's Government cannot be said to have resulted in any decrease of employ-
ment. In fact it has helped those industries which were susceptible of being helped. I will put it no higher than that. It has not penalised the consumer because there has been no general rise in prices. I am anxious to give the hon. Member for Aberdare, who made a most serious contribution on the position of the coal industry, complete satisfaction in regard to the questions he addressed to me. He asked: "Where are these mysterious industries; can the Parliamentary Secretary tell me where these new industries are to be found?" Certainly I will tell the hon. Member. In Greater London there are 30, of which 13 are in London itself, 10 at, Slough, three at Cricklewood and four at Welwyn. In Lancashire and York-shire there are five new industries; in the Midlands, six, and in other areas, two, making 43 in all. I quite understand the dilemma in which hon. Members opposite find themselves. In the first place, they disapprove of these industries altogether. In the second place, they plead, "Why do they not come into our constituencies?" In so far as hon. Gentlemen have been disappointed at not receiving new industries in their constituencies, I can only say that there are no sanctions possessed by the Government to oblige any particular undertaking to establish itself at any particular spot. Naturally, any undertaker of a new industry will have regard to the rates, to the general conditions in the neighbourhood, to the rigidity of trade union restrictions—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] I am giving an absolutely veracious account of what has been represented to us. I am not endeavouring to make any capital out of it; I am stating it, because we can benefit by experience. Some of these applicants who come to Government Departments for permission to bring foreign experts here say that they have a definite objection to particular areas because they understand that the trade union regulations in those areas are not sufficiently adjustable for their purposes, and, as I say, we have no control over them, nor can we compel them to go to any particular spot. I am answering the questions that were put to me.
I was further asked what we were doing to assist these areas by more persuasive methods. My right hon.
Friend has narrated to the Committee that in each area there is a development council. Originally many of these councils were established in cities or towns. They have been brought together, as far as possible, into regional and area councils. A further step towards consolidating them—a matter in which the hon. Member for Limehouse (Mr. Attlee) was interested—has been made quite recently. The Travel Association has now changed its name to the Travel and Industrial Development Association. It is partly assisted by a Government grant and my hon. Friend the Secretary of the Overseas Trade Department is chairman of the executive committee. The object is to unify the advertising of the various areas abroad. The surveys upon which I was questioned have now all been received by the Board of Trade. The Government take no credit for their initiation. The credit is entirely due to hon. Gentlemen opposite. The surveys are now in the printers' hands; they will be made public and the development associations will be provided with all the information which they contain. That I think answers most of the interrogatories directed to me on this point and I chink the answers show that the Government are not, in the least, disinterested in the movement.
The hon. Gentleman next referred to our export trade of which he gave a very doleful description. The hon. Member for East Edinburgh—if I may venture to refer to him again without causing him to rise once more and interrupt me—if I appreciated his argument, said that the only thing which mattered was the aggregate of trade. Surely, the only thing that matters is the volume of the trade. When prices have fallen you may still have an equal amount of trade although you appear to be suffering from a decline, which is the position with our export trade. The facts are that from the autumn of 1929 until August, 1931, there was a continuous decline in our export trade, which fell in that month to £29,000,000, or under one-half what it had been in the year 1929. Since August there has been an increase in our trade, slight though it be, and it has reached £31,000,000 as compared with £29,000,000, and this in spite of the decrease in prices. In an unstable world, our exports have
remained stable, and when my right hon. Friend drew attention to the fact that the exports of all competing countries had suffered considerably in comparison with our own, he was not rejoicing, as the hon. Gentleman endeavoured to represent, at the miseries of others, but was giving an illustration of the remarkable resilience of our people and of the success with which they had surmounted the obstacles that others had failed to overcome. It was not taking to ourselves undue pride or displaying any conceit.
Many speeches have been made to-day illustrative of the difficulties with which our export trade is confronted. The hon. Member for Aberdare (Mr. G. Hall) laid very great stress upon them. They take many forms. I was asked to give some particulars, but I do not wish to trouble the Committee by offering a catalogue of particular countries which have placed obstacles in our way. I could give a list of a number of countries which in the last few months have increased their tariffs. That is one difficulty, but a tariff offers an obstacle which is equal to all countries alike. I have a very few examples of countries that have reduced their tariffs, but I have a very conspicuous one in Australia.
Not only have tariffs been raised, but measures have been taken against this country on the ground that we have a depreciated currency. That is another difficulty which faces us, from which some of our competitors are entirely liberated. A third difficulty is the exchange restrictions which have been placed on the payment for our goods when they are sent to a very large number of countries. That is really a very serious problem.
Lastly, there are the quota restrictions and the various kinds of import controls. This quota method is a comparatively new method, and, when one discusses it, one is conscious of being relevant to a great deal that has been said this evening. Why, say hon. Gentlemen opposite, have you not a plan to improve your industries? Our difficulty is not to produce more or even not to produce with greater competitive facility. We are now producing at competitive prices, as the figures of our export trade indicate, but where you have a quota system in operation against you you are confronted with something which is quite novel. It does not matter how you reorganise your in-
dustry, you cannot get into another country goods in excess of your quota. Unfortunately, our writ does not run in those countries, and when a country discriminates against us, when we get a quota which is not in proportion to our entitlement, we have a right to protest. It is in such circumstances as that that we have protested against certain quotas. We had a very remarkable maiden speech from the hon. Member for Morpeth (Mr. G. Nicholson), a speech which will render the greatest service to this country if it be printed abroad. After giving a very accurate analysis of the reasons why we take exception to the coal quotas of France, Germany and Belgium, he expressed an indignation which is common to the whole British people, and I hope note will be taken of his remarks. He suggested that the proper solution of the difficulty was to enter into bilateral commercial agreements with certain foreign countries in exchange for mutual advantages. It has already been announced that we will not undertake to enter into any commitments of that kind until after the conclusion of the Ottawa Conference, and, of course, we cannot recede from the declaration made on that point.

Mr. G. NICHOLSON: I suggested that negotiations should be started.

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: Yes, we cannot enter into formal negotiations, but I can assure the hon. Member that conversations have taken place, and we have a pretty shrewd idea of the directions in which it may be advisable for this country to advance, but everything, of course, depends upon the Ottawa Conference. We are just as conscious as the hon. Member for Aberdare of the great hurt that these coal quotas do to our people, and the reaction they have on employment in this country. Although I am not a member of the Opposition, I will elaborate the criticisms which he himself made on these quotas. From the beginning of the imposition of the coal quotas in France, Belgium and Germany we have suffered a reduction of 340,000 tons a month in our export trade, and the further contractions that now menace us will be responsible for another 250,000 tons a month. The reduction of 340,000 tons already suffered means unemployment for 16,000 miners in this country, to say nothing of trans-
port workers, dockers, seamen, and workers in other trades involved; and the further reductions with which we are now threatened will be responsible for another 12,000 miners becoming unemployed. The value in pounds sterling of the losses which we have suffered and are about to suffer represents an export trade of over £5,000,000 per year. So we are painfully aware of what these quotas mean, and I ask the Members of the Committee, and specially my hon. Friend the Member for East Edinburgh, who has given so much reflection to these matters, whether the old doctrine that imports pay for exports can be true when artificial limitation is placed upon the means of payment. We can receive as much as France, Germany and Belgium will send us, but we cannot send another scuttleful of coal to those countries. In that case how can exports pay for imports? A great change has come over the world.
A further question I was asked on this point concerns the arrangement made under the Hague Protocol in accordance with which Italy was to take from us 1,000,000 tons of coal a year for three years. In the year 1930, Italy took 972,000 tons under that agreement. In 1931—the year for this purpose ends in April—she has taken 830,000 tons. The Italian State railways are on the very best understanding with the South Wales coal trade, and we have no reason to anticipate that there will be any desire on the part of Italy not to fulfil those obligations, and, if possible, to renew them.
I have painted the darker side of the picture. To compensate for our loss of coal exports to the countries with which f have been dealing, I would like to say that Scandinavia has increased her purchases of coal from us for January, February and March, as compared with the equivalent period last year, from 724,000 tons to 896,000 tons. Canada has almost doubled her purchases, and Brazil has more than doubled hers from 123,000 tons to 287,000 tons. Russia—if I dare mention that country—has purchased 49,000 tons in the same period this year, as against 6,000 tons last year. This, to some extent, has compensated us for the damage done elsewhere, and partly explains how we have managed to keep in
employment such a large number of miners.
The measures taken to rectify the adverse balance of payments have not met with the misfortunes which were predicted. We have taken a further step. We passed an Imports Duties Act and there was included in it a provision for the taxation of food, but not to the extent which has been represented. We were told that as a result of that action the price of the people's food would mount immediately. Such items of the people's food as are affected by that taxation have been carrying that penalty now for more than a month. The hon. Member for North-East Bethnal Green (Major Nathan) played a very useful part in the Debates, and I am pleased he did so because we were short of critics. He performed a very necessary constitutional service by putting the contrary point of view. In one imaginative passage he told us that the wolves of Protection were about to stalk through the land. The foodstuffs I have mentioned have been subject to the wolves of Protection for one month or more. I cannot give the result to the Committee with extreme accuracy, because the index figure has not been published, but it will be published in a few days' time. All I will say is that I should not be surprised that the cost of foodstuffs will be found to have reached as low a level as it has ever reached since 1915, and the country will find that the wolves of Protection are quite tame. Whenever the Government try to deal with a practical problem, it is always possible to divert attention by indulging in generalities. I am not going to dispute now the doctrine put forward by the hon. and learned Member for East Bristol (Sir S. Cripps) about the merits of Socialism, because it is not necessary for me to do so, but I deny that we intended these tariffs to be used as a screen behind which inefficiency could flourish. That was the question which the hon. and learned Gentleman put to me.

Sir S. CRIPPS: No, I did not suggest that. I asked what the hon. Gentleman's Department was doing as regards the organisation of industry behind the tariff.

Mr. HORE-BELISHA: I do not think the new version of the question differs very much from the old. I do not want to do the hon. Member an injustice, and I will answer both questions. We do not consider it to be the function of a Government Department to run industry. We believe that industries are quite capable, or ought to be quite capable, of running their own affairs. The hon. and learned Gentleman will realise the disaster that would overcome the Socialist party if the day came when it was run by Liberals. Every man to his last. Intelligent, capable and energetic as the Civil Servant is, his task is to run the Civil Service and not industry, but where industries can indicate to the Government how the Government can assist them by removing obstacles in their path, there they can and do come to us, and we have endeavoured to assist them. We have given them the conditions in which they should secure their own efficiency. If they fail, then will be the time for hon. Gentlemen opposite to come to us and say, "Look at the deplorable condition of this or that industry," and it will be for the Government to consider whether they should take away from that industry the boon which has been offered to it, or should make other proposals. But in the first place we have been concerned with the very urgent task of stopping the leak in the roof, and not with arranging the disposition of the furniture inside. We have been doing that with great efficacy. We do not ask to he judged in accordance with any high moral principles. We only ask to be judged by the results.

Motion made, and Question "That the Chairman do report Progress, and ask leave to sit again," put, and agreed to. —[Sir George Penny.]

Committee report Progress; to sit again To-morrow.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

ADJOURNMENT.

Resolved, "That this House do now adjourn." —[Captain Margesson.]

Adjourned accordingly at Five Minutes before Eleven o'Clock.